A reference
There was never one Egyptian religion. There were three thousand years of them.
Gods merged, split, swapped roles and were promoted or demoted with the cities that housed them. Every entry here says when its form is attested and how it changed, and every myth says which text it comes from and how late that text is.
The twenty-four single-consonant signs
How the script worksVowels are not written. Every vocalisation you have seen, Amun, Osiris, Nefertiti, is a modern convention or a Greek transcription rather than a reading. Nobody knows how any of it sounded.
Why this matters
Set was not the villain.
For most of Egyptian history Set stands in the solar barque and kills the serpent Apophis every night, defending creation itself. Second Dynasty kings took his name. He hardens into a figure of evil only late, after Egypt is occupied by foreign powers whose gods were identified with him.
Nearly every popular retelling gives you the last version and calls it the myth. The same happens to Isis, who grows from a minor figure in the Pyramid Texts into a goddess with temples from Britain to the Euphrates, and to Bastet, who begins as a lioness and softens into a cat over centuries.
The gods
Grouped by the role they played, not by a family tree.
The genealogies contradict each other between cities and between centuries, and the Egyptians never resolved that. Each group below carries a pigment from the six an Egyptian painter actually had.
Solar
9 gods
Ra, Hathor, Khepri, Khonsu, Montu and 4 more
Osirian
6 gods
Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, Nephthys and 1 more
Ennead
4 gods
Nut, Geb, Shu, Tefnut
Creator
14 gods
Thoth, Amun, Ptah, Maat, Atum and 9 more
Protective
17 gods
Sekhmet, Bastet, Mut, Nekhbet, Wadjet and 12 more
Underworld
7 gods
Anubis, Apophis, Wepwawet, Sokar, Ammit and 2 more
River and land
9 gods
Sobek, Hapi, Min, Anuket, Satet and 4 more
The myths
The Osiris story everyone knows is mostly Plutarch.
The chest, the journey to Byblos, the body cut into fourteen pieces, the piece a fish swallowed: all of that comes from a Greek writing around 100 CE, more than two thousand years after the earliest Egyptian evidence. The Egyptian sources allude to the murder constantly and never once narrate it, because they are ritual spells rather than stories.
So every myth here names its sources, and names the parts that appear only in a late or foreign one.
Alluded to from c. 2400 BCE; told as a connected narrative only c. 100 CE
The murder of Osiris
The one Egyptian myth everyone can name, and the one where the famous version is Greek.
c. 1160 BCE, Twentieth Dynasty
The Contendings of Horus and Set
Eighty years of divine litigation, with bribery, shapeshifting and open comedy at the gods' expense.
c. 1300 BCE, though the text claims to be older
The Destruction of Mankind
Ra sends a goddess to punish humanity, then has to get her drunk to stop her finishing the job.
c. 1300 BCE, Nineteenth Dynasty
Isis and the secret name of Ra
A goddess poisons the sun god in order to blackmail him for his real name.
c. 2400 BCE, in the Pyramid Texts
Creation at Heliopolis
One god alone on a mound in the water, producing the first pair from himself.
Inscribed c. 700 BCE, claiming a much older original
Creation by speech at Memphis
Ptah conceives the world in his heart and speaks it into existence, and the text arguing this is a piece of political propaganda.
The symbols
Egyptian art is not decorated. It is written.
Almost every shape a modern viewer reads as ornament is a sign with a sound and a meaning. A god holds an ankh to a kingβs nose because that is a statement, not a prop. The wedjat eye is not the eye on the dollar bill, and the ankh is not a cross.
6
parts of a person
The afterlife
English has one word, soul, for something Egyptian divided into at least five parts with different jobs. That is why the funerary texts read like mysticism when they are closer to an inventory.
12
primary sources
There is no Egyptian bible
A set of funerary compositions, temple inscriptions and a few literary papyri, each from a particular time and place, disagreeing with each other.
10
periods
Three thousand years of revision
From the Predynastic to the last hieroglyphic inscription at Philae in 394 CE, with what changed in religion in each.
12
cult centres
The map is the mechanism
A god belongs to a city and rises and falls with it. Amun is a minor Theban god until Thebes runs the country.
Start with the sources
The one Egyptian myth everyone can name, and the one where the famous version is Greek.
If you take one thing from this site, take the habit of asking which text a claim comes from and how old that text is. It is the difference between knowing Egyptian mythology and knowing a Greek essay about it.