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Egyptian Mythology

The gods

Each one, and how it changed.

Grouped by the role they played rather than by a family tree, because the genealogies contradict each other between cities and between centuries, and the Egyptians never resolved that. Each group carries one of the six pigments actually available to an Egyptian painter.

Solar

7 gods

The sun and everything that rides with it. Not one god but a role, which several gods occupy at different hours and in different centuries.

Osirian

5 gods

The family at the centre of the only Egyptian myth most people can name: murder, search, resurrection and a succession dispute that ran eighty years.

Ennead

4 gods

The nine of Heliopolis, the oldest surviving account of how the world was made. A cosmology and a genealogy at once.

Creator

9 gods

Gods credited with making everything, by four different cities, in four incompatible ways. Egypt never chose between them.

Protective

9 gods

Household, childbirth, poison and war. The gods most Egyptians actually prayed to, as opposed to the ones the state paid for.

Underworld

5 gods

The dead, the judgement and the things waiting in the twelve hours of the night.

River and land

3 gods

The inundation, the crocodile, the potter's wheel and the harvest. The gods of the thing Egypt actually was: a river.