Solar
Ra
rꜥHow it changed
Absorbed rival creator gods rather than displacing them. Fused with Amun of Thebes as Amun-Ra when Thebes rose, and with Horus as Ra-Horakhty. By the New Kingdom, Ra is less a single god than a solar role other gods can occupy.
Cult centre
Heliopolis
Best attested
Old Kingdom onward, dominant from the Fifth Dynasty
Family
Self-created; father of Shu and Tefnut in the Heliopolitan account.
Epithets
- “Lord of the horizon”
- “He who is over his sun-folk”
How to recognise the figure
A falcon-headed man crowned with the sun disc encircled by a cobra. In the underworld he appears ram-headed.
Appears in
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.
c. 1500 BCE onward, in royal tombs
The twelve hours of the night
The sun does not set. It dies, travels through the underworld, unites with Osiris at midnight, and is reborn.
Alluded to from the New Kingdom; a long demotic version survives from the Roman period
The distant goddess
The Eye of Ra storms off to Nubia in a rage, and the world dries up until she can be talked into coming home.
c. 1200 BCE, Nineteenth Dynasty
The Tale of Two Brothers
A folk tale, not a myth, and the oldest surviving story of a wife falsely accusing a man who refused her.
Ptolemaic, on the walls of the temple of Edfu
Horus of Edfu and the winged disc
A campaign narrative, carved on a temple wall, in which the sun god's son puts down a rebellion province by province.
Carries
Worshipped at
Others in this group