Egyptian Myths

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Contributors, authors, editors and sources for this series include:

Loren Auerbach, Norman Bancroft-Hunt, E.M. Berens, Katharine Berry Judson, Laura Bulbeck, Jeremiah Curtin, O.B. Duane, Dr Ray Dunning, W.W. Gibbings, H. A. Guerber, Jake Jackson, Joseph Jacobs, Judith John, J.W. Mackail, Donald Mackenzie, Chris McNab, Professor James Riordan, Sara Robson, Rachel Storm, K.E. Sullivan, Epiphanius Wilson, E.T.C. Werner.

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First published 2018

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Contents

Series Foreword

Introduction to Ancient Egyptian Culture

Creation Stories

Solar Myths

Theological Debates

Osiris, God of Death and Rebirth

Myth and Magic

Thoth the Intellectual God

Mighty Goddesses

Animals in Myth

Burial Rites and Practices

Life, Death and Resurrection

Ancient Egyptian Literature

Thoth, the Scribe of the Gods

Earliest Writing Materials

The Pyramid Texts

The Book of the Dead

Books of the Dead of the Graeco-Roman Period

Tales from the Pyramid Texts

The Opening of the Mouth Ceremony

The Presentation of Offerings

A Hymn to Nut, the Sky Goddess

A Hymn to Ra, the Sun God

The Power of the King in Heaven

The Majesty of King Pepi

Spells from the Books of the Dead

Hymn to Osiris from the Papyrus of Ani

Hymn to Osiris from the Papyrus of Hunefer

Address and Litany from the Papyrus of Ani

A Funerary Hymn to Ra

A Prayer for Forgiveness of Sins

A Prayer for the Weighing of the Heart

A Declaration Before Judgment

Spells for Preservation and Everlasting Life

Spells to Make Reptiles Powerless

The Book of Breathings

The Book of Traversing Eternity

The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys

The Festival Songs of Isis and Nephthys

The Book of Making Splendid the Spirit of Osiris

Tales of Ancient Egyptian Magicians

Ubaaner and the Wax Crocodile

Tchatchamankh and the Gold Ornament

The Magician Teta

The Story of Rut-Tetet and the Three Sons of Ra

The Egyptian Story of the Creation

The British Museum Papyrus

How Ra Came Into Being

Legends of the Gods

The Destruction of Mankind

The Legend of Ra and Isis

The Legend of Horus of Behutet

The Legend of Khnemu and the Seven Years’ Famine

The Legend of the Wanderings of Isis

The Legend of the Princess of Bekhten

Historical Literature

Extract from the Palermo Stone

Edict against the Blacks

Inscription of Usertsen III at Semnah

Campaign of Thothmes II in the Sudan

Capture of Megiddo by Thothmes III

Summary of the Reign of Rameses III

The Invasion and Conquest of Egypt by Piankhi

Autobiographical Literature

The Autobiography of Una

The Autobiography of Herkhuf

The Autobiography of Ameni Amenemhat

The Autobiography of Thetha

The Autobiography of Aahmes, surnamed Pen-Nekheb

The Autobiography of Tehuti, the Erpa

The Autobiography of Thaiemhetep

Tales of Travel and Adventure

The Story of Sanehat

The Story of the Educated Peasant Khuenanpu

The Journey of the Priest Unu-Amen into Syria

Fairy Tales

The Tale of the Two Brothers

The Story of the Shipwrecked Traveller

Egyptian Hymns to the Gods

Hymn to Amen-Ra

Hymn to Amen

Hymn to the Sun-god

Hymn to Osiris

Hymn to Shu

Moral and Philosophical Literature

The Precepts of Ptah-hetep

The Maxims of Ani

The Talk of a Man Who Was Tired of Life with His Soul

The Lament of Khakhepersenb

The Lament of Apuur

Egyptian Poetic Compositions

Song of the Harper

Series Foreword

Stretching back to the oral traditions of thousands of years ago, tales of heroes and disaster, creation and conquest have been told by many different civilizations in many different ways. Their impact sits deep within our culture even though the detail in the tales themselves are a loose mix of historical record, transformed narrative and the distortions of hundreds of storytellers.

Today the language of mythology lives with us: our mood is jovial, our countenance is saturnine, we are narcissistic and our modern life is hermetically sealed from others. The nuances of myths and legends form part of our daily routines and help us navigate the world around us, with its half truths and biased reported facts.

The nature of a myth is that its story is already known by most of those who hear it, or read it. Every generation brings a new emphasis, but the fundamentals remain the same: a desire to understand and describe the events and relationships of the world. Many of the great stories are archetypes that help us find our own place, equipping us with tools for self-understanding, both individually and as part of a broader culture.

For Western societies it is Greek mythology that speaks to us most clearly. It greatly influenced the mythological heritage of the ancient Roman civilization and is the lens through which we still see the Celts, the Norse and many of the other great peoples and religions. The Greeks themselves learned much from their neighbours, the Egyptians, an older culture that became weak with age and incestuous leadership.

It is important to understand that what we perceive now as mythology had its own origins in perceptions of the divine and the rituals of the sacred. The earliest civilizations, in the crucible of the Middle East, in the Sumer of the third millennium

bc

, are the source to which many of the mythic archetypes can be traced. As humankind collected together in cities for the first time, developed writing and industrial scale agriculture, started to irrigate the rivers and attempted to control rather than be at the mercy of its environment, humanity began to write down its tentative explanations of natural events, of floods and plagues, of disease.

Early stories tell of Gods (or god-like animals in the case of tribal societies such as African, Native American or Aboriginal cultures) who are crafty and use their wits to survive, and it is reasonable to suggest that these were the first rulers of the gathering peoples of the earth, later elevated to god-like status with the distance of time. Such tales became more political as cities vied with each other for supremacy, creating new Gods, new hierarchies for their pantheons. The older Gods took on primordial roles and became the preserve of creation and destruction, leaving the new gods to deal with more current, everyday affairs. Empires rose and fell, with Babylon assuming the mantle from Sumeria in the 1800s

bc

, then in turn to be swept away by the Assyrians of the 1200s

bc

; then the Assyrians and the Egyptians were subjugated by the Greeks, the Greeks by the Romans and so on, leading to the spread and assimilation of common themes, ideas and stories throughout the world.

The survival of history is dependent on the telling of good tales, but each one must have the ‘feeling’ of truth, otherwise it will be ignored. Around the firesides, or embedded in a book or a computer, the myths and legends of the past are still the living materials of retold myth, not restricted to an exploration of origins. Now we have devices and global communications that give us unparalleled access to a diversity of traditions. We can find out about Native American, Indian, Chinese and tribal African mythology in a way that was denied to our ancestors, we can find connections, match the archaeology, religion and the mythologies of the world to build a comprehensive image of the human experience that is endlessly fascinating.

The stories in this book provide an introduction to the themes and concerns of the myths and legends of their respective cultures, with a short introduction to provide a linguistic, geographic and political context. This is where the myths have arrived today, but undoubtedly over the next millennia, they will transform again whilst retaining their essential truths and signs.

Jake Jackson

General Editor

Introduction to Ancient

Egyptian Culture

The original inhabitants of the Nile valley were Palaeolithic peoples who settled there at least 7,000 years ago, following the desertification of their previously fertile homeland in eastern Sahara. These were nomadic hunter-gatherer folk whose major creator-divinity was the cosmic serpent, itself a representation of the all-nurturing mother earth.

In the millennia following the original settlement of the Nile valley, the region was influenced by the early Neolithic cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East, whose prime divinity was a mother goddess with bird and snake attributes. In Egypt these motifs were differentially adopted and embodied in local fauna: Lower Egypt taking the cobra as its sacred emblem, while Upper Egypt (the region south of the first waterfall at Aswan) acknowledged the vulture. After the unification of all Egypt under one pharaoh in c. 3100

bc

, the kingship was associated with the sun.

Creation Stories

The opposition between the aboriginal cult of mother earth and the pharaonic identification with the sky is reflected in a conflict of ideas evident in the various accounts of Creation that appear in their mythology. Some of these stories, like the myths of the cosmic egg and the water bird, derive from the Palaeolithic culture of aboriginal Egypt. According to this cluster of myths, the world began when the first land emerged from the watery abyss called Nun. Some accounts say this primal land was called Ma’at, a feminine noun meaning ‘truth’, ‘order’ and ‘justice’, and associate it with the primordial mud of the Nile, from which all life grew. Another version says that a mystic lotus emerged from the primeval mud, opening to reveal an infant god who created the state of order called Ma’at. Other stories present the life-heralding waterbird, which in the earliest traditions is an aspect of the earth mother, as a manifestation of the sun god. A combination of earth goddess and sky god theologies appears in another creation myth. According to this, the forces of chaos issued four male-and-female couples, called the Ogdoad, from the watery abyss, who jointly formed the cosmic egg from which the sun god was hatched.

Separation and Hierarchy

The clearest statement of intention to separate the antecedents of kingship and state from the all-mothering earth goddess appears in several creation myths. In one of these, the first creator-deity was called Atem (or Tem) and emerged from the abyss in the form of a serpent, later taking human form. Feeling lonely, Atem took his phallus in his hand and produced semen, from which he formed the first divine couple, Shu and Tefenet, who were progenitors of a line of divinities.

A similar act of creative masturbation is told regarding the god Ptah, the master craftsman of the Egyptian pantheon. These stories appear to symbolize the emergence of a predominantly male ruling class which saw itself as intrinsically separate from, and superior to, the aboriginal population and its traditions of continuity with the primal earth. Nevertheless, the myth-makers of ancient Egypt ingeniously wove together creation myths expressing the interests of diverse groups and traditions so as to promote cohesion within a highly stratified and authoritarian social order.

At various times in Egypt’s long history, economic collapse ensued from variations in the water level of the Nile, which led to political disintegration. There were three such periods, called ‘intermediate’ by historians.

A Conflict of Myths

In about 3000

bc

, invaders from the north east speaking a Semitic language, overran Egypt and imposed on the unstratified stateless aboriginal communities, with their matrilineal and mother-focused social organization and gender equality, a hierarchical social order based on patrilineal descent and male pre-eminence. The invaders unified the previously autonomous regions of Upper and Lower Egypt into a single state ruled by a king with the title of per’aa, or ‘pharaoh’, meaning ‘great estate’, ‘house’ or ‘palace’.

The pharaoh was assisted by a priestly class of which he was the foremost member: a being who was both man and god, mortal and immortal. Over time the pharaonic priesthood developed and transformed the creation myths and relatively simple pantheon of the aboriginal culture to reflect the ideology and power structure of the new Egyptian state. However, the priests were unable to erase collective awareness of the original religion of the earth and the cosmic serpent, so the latter was transformed into the evil snake Apep or Apophis, a symbol of darkness, chaos and a perpetual antagonist of the solar order established by the pharaonic kingship. Other, originally sovereign feminine deities such as Ma’at, were redefined as subordinate to the ruling male sun god, Ra (or Re).

Solar Myths

With the union of Upper and Lower Egypt under the pharaonic kingship in about 3100

bc

, myths focused on the king as a solar being began to circulate. The most complex and enduring of these myths concerned Osiris, supposedly first of the pharaohs and an incarnation of the sun god Amen-Ra.

The principal centre of sun-god worship for Ra throughout Egypt’s ancient history was at Anu (or Annu), called Heliopolis (‘city of the sun’) by the Greeks, and now a suburb of modern Cairo. He was depicted with the body of a man and the head of a hawk, the latter symbolizing height in the sky. In his nocturnal post-mortem journey through the watery afterworld, the god-king, Ra-as-sun, was constantly menaced by the primordial serpent Apep, the emblem of chaos, who was most powerful at the darkest hour of night. It was then the special duty of the sun god’s priests to recite a long liturgy of curses detailing Apep’s dismemberment and destruction by fire.

Child of the Sun

From early in the dynastic period the pharaoh was held to be a child of the deified sun. From time to time this solar blood-line was renewed by the god assuming the form of the reigning pharaoh, visiting the queen in her bedchamber and fathering her son. After the child’s birth it was ritually presented to Ra in his temple, when the god was supposed to accept and acknowledge his divine offspring.

The long-dominant priesthood of Ra, a name meaning ‘sole creator’, displayed great ingenuity and political acumen in preserving and incorporating the older cults of Egypt in their rituals, insisting only that their priests acknowledge the overall sovereignty of the sun god. Thus Osiris and Isis, the great goddess of the Nile, became absorbed into the pantheon of pharaonic Egypt. However, the more ancient myth of the dying and reborn Osiris proved eventually to exercise most appeal to the Egyptian imagination. This was because the powers of Osiris as king of the afterworld included the ability to confer immortality on the souls of deceased humans. During the Later Dynastic Period the Osiris cult took on many of the attributes of the sun god. His perennial appeal could also relate to the fact that his myth reaches back to the prehistoric, pre-dynastic Egyptian Osirian myth-ritual of the divine king, whose sacrificial death and reincarnation in his young successor were held to guarantee the prosperity of the land and people.

Theological Debates

The many, often conflicting, ideas formulated by the priesthood of dynastic Egypt over the millennia are evidence of a lively tradition of theological debate. At various times the reigning theology was polytheism, henotheism (proposing a supreme god among many lesser divinities) and incipient monotheism. Egypt came closest to embracing monotheism during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten (1364–1347

bc

), when the king tried to suppress the worship of all deities with the exception of Aten, a form of the sun god, with which he identified himself. A hymn in praise of Aten began, ‘Oh you beautiful being, who is ever renewed and made young again as Aten!’. However, after Akhenaten’s death the country reverted to polytheism.

Even trinitarianism, familiar in Christian theology, found its advocates in a New Kingdom hymn to Amen, the original creator-deity, which proclaims his threefold nature as Amen the ‘hidden’ god, Ra (the sun) as his visible form and Ptah (one of the four creator-divinities) as his mystical body.

Osiris, God of Death and Rebirth

Although Egyptians held that Osiris was the first to occupy the throne of the Pharaohs, his cult seems to have already existed in pre-dynastic times, particularly associated with the town of Abydos on the upper Nile. Later his identity became fused with that of the sun god Ra into a being known as Amen-Ra.

The many myths focused on the person of Osiris, the perpetually dying and reborn god-king, can be thought of as a collective meditation through five millennia of Egyptian history and prehistory on the theme of continuity through change and the pervasive patterns of cyclicity in human and cosmic existence. The most spectacular and most frequently recurrent of these cycles is the daily progress of the sun through the heavens, its dramatic disappearance at sunset and no less dramatic reappearance at dawn. Egyptian mythical thought saw this diurnal sequence of events as the ever-repeated birth, middle age (his highest point in the sky, at noon) and eventual death of the sun god. To achieve rebirth at the beginning of the next day, Ra travelled through the other world where Osiris had established himself as judge and king.

Myth and Magic

For Ancient Egyptians, as generally for peoples living in pre-modern, pre-industrial conditions, the world was experienced as a living environment in which every object, whether animate or inanimate in our terms, was inhabited by some form of consciousness or ‘spirit’, with which human beings could interact. In this situation, every priest was also a magician.

The priests of Ra the sun god were passionately involved in the god’s daily passage across heaven and through Tuat, the other world. It would be misleading to imagine that the priests thought of their elaborate rituals and liturgy as causing the regular movement of the solar body, its setting and rising; rather, they collectively participated in these recurrent events, as actors in a cosmic drama principally involving the opposed agents of order and chaos, led by Ra and the serpent Apep respectively.

Ra’s Voyage

Egyptian cosmology supposed that the sky was a watery realm in some way mirroring the watery darkness of Tuat, the other world. So it was appropriate that the sun god progressed across the sky in a celestial boat accompanied by a number of gods, with Thoth and Ma’at acting as navigators and Horus, son of the great goddess Isis, as helmsman. When this boat reached the edge of the realm of darkness that is Tuat, they transferred, as ‘dead’ deities, to another boat. The other world was said to be a long, narrow valley, approached through a mountain pass. The valley contained a river on which the sun god’s boat sailed, and it was divided into 12 sections corresponding to the hours of the night.

Every one of the 12 divisions saw distinctive episodes in the struggle between Ra and his companions and the forces of chaos; and throughout the journey the priests of Ra rehearsed the epic story in every detail. Near the end of the final hour the sun god entered the tail of a giant serpent, from which he emerged into the light of dawn as a young god-man, ready to begin another day’s journey through the sky.

Words of Power

When the priests recited the story of Ra’s journey through heaven and the other world, the most difficult part of their performance was not just the production of the words of the elaborate narrative, but their utterance in a certain manner that made them, as the Egyptians put it, ‘words of power’. At a crucial stage in the struggle between Horus and Seth, the god of chaos, Isis (the mother of Horus) uses her ‘words of power’ to keep the monster at bay. All deities were thought to own such words, through which they accomplished miraculous deeds, and it was the ambition of mortal Egyptians to acquire them, so they could do likewise. According to some texts, these words lived in the hearts or livers of their divine owners.

Secret Names

Related to the concept of ‘words of power’ is the idea, general in ancient Egypt, that every deity had a secret name through which he or she lived. One story about the god Osiris tells how he transformed himself from the essence of primeval matter into a god, merely by uttering his own secret name. A person clever enough to discover the hidden name of a deity could, it was believed, command the services of its divine possessor.

Thoth the Intellectual God

Among the cluster of divinities brought into being at the time of Creation, the god Thoth, together with his consort the goddess Ma’at, was particularly involved in the establishment and maintenance of order in heaven and earth. The duties of Thoth went much further than these matters, since he was responsible for the mathematical calculations behind the regulation of the cosmos. It was he who invented all the arts and sciences known to humankind; he was ‘the scribe of the gods’ and ‘the lord of books’. Thoth measured and regulated the times and the seasons, in which role he was known as the moon god. He is also described as ‘the tongue and the heart’ of Ra the sun god himself. Some later Greek texts portray Thoth as the animator of human speech, giving him a nature similar to that of Plato’s Logos. At its simplest, the term Logos means ‘word’, though in Greek philosophy logos encapsulated a general notion of reasoning or intellectual thought, expressed through reading and writing. In Greek philosophy reason was considered to be one of the guiding principles of the universe. Logos, therefore, embodies this principle as well as the expression of metaphysical knowledge. The ancient Greeks identified Thoth with their own Hermes, describing the Egyptian god as the inventor of astrology and astronomy, mathematics and geography, medicine and botany.

In hieroglyphic texts Thoth is sometimes portrayed as an ibis, sometimes as a kind of ape. The main centre of his cult was at Khemenu, or Hermopolis as the Greeks called it.

Mighty Goddesses

There were many powerful goddesses in the Egyptian pantheon, some of them fearsome, like Neith the goddess of hunting and war, and Sekhmet, the solar deity with the head of a lioness, who was associated with smallpox and other contagious diseases. The greatest of them all, however, was Isis, the consort of Osiris.

Isis Discovers Ra’s Secret Name

One of the most interesting myths about Isis tells how she tricked the sun god Ra into revealing to her his secret name, and thus the source of his power. Apparently, the goddess was ambitious to become the equal of Ra in his mastery of heaven and earth. At this time Ra had become old, and dribbled on the ground. Isis collected some of his spittle and made a venomous serpent out of it, which she laid in Ra’s path so that when the sun god passed that way, he was fatally bitten. She consented to use her healing words of power to expel the poison from Ra’s body and allow him to live, but only after he had told Isis his secret name. The story implies that Isis did indeed realize her ambition to become the sun god’s equal.

Hathor, the Great Cosmic Mother

Another goddess who shared many of the powers and attributes of Isis was Hathor, ‘the Egyptian Venus’, patroness of lovers. She also blessed singers, dancers and artists. Like Neith – mother of Isis, Horus and Osiris, and guardian goddess of men and gods – Hathor was already known in the pre-pharaonic period, when she was worshipped in the form of a cow. She was also identified with the sky and recognized as the principal female counterpart of Ra; as such, Hathor was the Great Cosmic Mother, a divinity with roots in the Palaeolithic era. Her most famous temple was at Dendara, south of Abydos.

The loving Hathor contrasted with the ferocious Sekhmet, who was sent by the gods to destroy humankind when they began to plot against the aged Ra. After many had died, the sun god decided to spare the rest. To distract Sekhmet from her orgy of slaughter, Ra ordered the high priest at Heliopolis to make a vast quantity of beer and to stain it red. When Sekhmet saw it she lapped it up, thinking it was blood, and became so drunk she forgot her murderous mission, and was transformed into the beautiful and pacific Hathor.

Eventually, however, it was the fame of Isis that became supreme. After Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in 332

bc

and its subsequent occupation by Rome, the cult of Isis and her infant son Horus spread through the Empire, including France, Britain and Germany. The image of the nurturing mother and the divine child was eventually mirrored in popular imagination with the image of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus.

Foreign Influences

Another powerful female deity in dynastic Egypt was Bastet, the goddess of love, sex and fertility, who was usually depicted with a cat’s head, and earlier in the pre-dynastic era with the head of a lioness.

The influence of Near Eastern culture on Egyptian society and culture is evident in a myth that has Seth, the divine ‘destroyer of boundaries’ and embodiment of chaos, being given two foreign goddesses in compensation for ceding his right to the throne of Egypt to Horus, son of Isis and Osiris. The goddesses were Anat, sister and consort of the Canaanite deity Baal, and Astarte (Ishtar), the great Semitic goddess.

Female Power

Neith could well be the oldest of all the Egyptian deities, because images of this goddess of hunting and war, whose insignia was a bow, two arrows and a shield, have been found at the major site of pre-dynastic settlement at Abydos, suggesting that her cult was introduced by the aboriginal Palaeolithic immigrants from the Sahara. Later, Neith’s main cultic centre was in the Delta city of Sais.

Archaeological work at the huge prehistoric burial ground near Abydos has also unearthed a remarkable and aesthetically powerful representation of a triumphant female figure who could also be Neith or perhaps a more generalized image of the Earth Mother. Examination of the graves has shown that the largest and most richly furnished were those of females, suggesting women had high status during this prehistoric period, contrasting with their political obscurity during the pharaonic era. Royal women were the exceptions to this rule in the pharaonic era, and included the historically famous Nefertiti, the fourteenth-century-

bc

consort of Pharaoh Akhenaten, and Cleopatra (70–31

bc

). Nevertheless, an Egyptian, married, commoner woman of the pharaonic era was substantially better off than,