About
A reference that tells you where it got things.
01
There was never one Egyptian religion
Egyptian religion ran for more than three thousand years, and over that span gods merged, split, swapped roles, absorbed each other's epithets and were promoted or demoted with the fortunes of the cities that housed them. So every one of the 42 entries carries when its form is best attested and how the god was revised. A page that flattens three millennia into "god of the sky" is telling you almost nothing.
02
Every myth names the text it comes from
The Osiris story everyone knows, with the chest, the fourteen pieces and the swallowed phallus, is mostly Plutarch, a Greek writing around 100 CE in another language for a philosophical audience. Egyptian sources allude to the murder constantly and narrate it almost never. All 12 myths here list their sources with dates, and name the parts that appear only in a late, foreign or single-source text.
03
The sources are treated as evidence, not as scripture
There is no Egyptian bible. There are 12 kinds of thing on the sources page: funerary compositions, temple inscriptions, wisdom literature and a handful of literary papyri, each from a particular time and place, disagreeing with each other. Each entry says what that source cannot be used to prove.
04
Contradictions are left standing
Four cities produced four incompatible creation accounts and Egypt never chose between them. Two rival maps of the sun's night journey were carved in the same royal tombs. Horus is two originally separate gods running under one name. Where the sources conflict this site says so, because the conflict is the most interesting thing about the material and smoothing it over is how the subject gets flattened.
05
The design comes from the pigments, not the gift shop
Egyptian blue is the oldest known synthetic pigment, in use from about 2500 BCE. Red and yellow ochre are earth colours, malachite is ground copper carbonate, and carbon black came from soot. Those are the colours on this site, and the layout is built on registers, the horizontal bands with ruled baselines that Egyptian wall art is actually organised into.
On dates and translations
Egyptology uses several competing chronologies. Dates before the Late Period are approximate and disputed by decades or more, and this site uses conventional middle-chronology dates throughout. Where a date matters to an argument, the argument says so.
Quotations are from translations published before 1930 and therefore in the public domain. Those translations are also old, and Budge in particular is a century behind current scholarship and heavily criticised by Egyptologists. Where a public-domain translation is unreliable this site says so rather than presenting it as current, and the reading list points at modern ones.
Counts quoted anywhere on the site are computed from the data rather than typed in, so 42 gods means 42 entries exist. If something here is wrong, tell us and it will be corrected and the correction stated.