River and land
Min
mnwHow it changed
One of the oldest and least altered images in Egyptian religion, and the one nineteenth-century publications most often chose to crop. His festival opened with the king cutting the first sheaf of emmer, tying fertility, harvest and kingship into a single ceremony. Coptos sat at the head of the desert road to the Red Sea, which made him the patron of the men who went out along it.
Cult centre
Coptos and Akhmim
Best attested
Predynastic onward, among the earliest gods depicted
Family
Merged with Amun as Amun-Min; associated with Isis and with Horus as her son.
Epithets
- “Bull of his mother”
- “Lord of the eastern desert”
How to recognise the figure
A mummiform man, unmistakably ithyphallic, with one arm raised holding a flail and two tall plumes on his head.
Others in this group