The myths
Every story here says which text it came from.
Almost every popular account of Egyptian mythology is a retelling of a retelling, and the reader is never told where any of it comes from. 5 of the 12 below contain material that appears only in a late, foreign or single-source text, and each one names it rather than smoothing it in.
The murder of Osiris
Alluded to from c. 2400 BCE; told as a connected narrative only c. 100 CE
The one Egyptian myth everyone can name, and the one where the famous version is Greek.
Read with care
The chest, Byblos, the dismemberment into fourteen parts and the swallowed phallus are Plutarch and are not attested in this form in Egyptian sources. Egyptian texts do refer to the body bei...
The Contendings of Horus and Set
c. 1160 BCE, Twentieth Dynasty
Eighty years of divine litigation, with bribery, shapeshifting and open comedy at the gods' expense.
Read with care
This is a late, literary and frequently satirical text. Using it as evidence for what Egyptians believed a thousand years earlier is the mistake nearly every popular retelling makes. The god...
The Destruction of Mankind
c. 1300 BCE, though the text claims to be older
Ra sends a goddess to punish humanity, then has to get her drunk to stop her finishing the job.
Isis and the secret name of Ra
c. 1300 BCE, Nineteenth Dynasty
A goddess poisons the sun god in order to blackmail him for his real name.
Creation at Heliopolis
c. 2400 BCE, in the Pyramid Texts
One god alone on a mound in the water, producing the first pair from himself.
Creation by speech at Memphis
Inscribed c. 700 BCE, claiming a much older original
Ptah conceives the world in his heart and speaks it into existence, and the text arguing this is a piece of political propaganda.
Read with care
The claim to be copying an ancient papyrus is exactly the kind of claim a Twenty-fifth Dynasty king would want to make. Some Egyptologists have argued for an Old Kingdom original on linguist...
The eight of Hermopolis
Middle Kingdom onward, elaborated in the Graeco-Roman period
Four frog-headed gods and four snake-headed goddesses, standing for the qualities of the water before there was anything.
The twelve hours of the night
c. 1500 BCE onward, in royal tombs
The sun does not set. It dies, travels through the underworld, unites with Osiris at midnight, and is reborn.
The weighing of the heart
c. 1550 BCE onward, Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead
A heart on one pan, a feather on the other, and forty-two judges who each have to be addressed by name.
The distant goddess
Alluded to from the New Kingdom; a long demotic version survives from the Roman period
The Eye of Ra storms off to Nubia in a rage, and the world dries up until she can be talked into coming home.
The Tale of Two Brothers
c. 1200 BCE, Nineteenth Dynasty
A folk tale, not a myth, and the oldest surviving story of a wife falsely accusing a man who refused her.
Read with care
Not a myth at all, strictly. It is a literary tale that uses divine names for human characters, and reading it as evidence for the cult of Anubis is a category error. It is included here bec...
Horus of Edfu and the winged disc
Ptolemaic, on the walls of the temple of Edfu
A campaign narrative, carved on a temple wall, in which the sun god's son puts down a rebellion province by province.
Read with care
Very late. This is a Ptolemaic composition promoting one temple's own god, written when Egypt was ruled by Greeks, and its ordering of Egypt's provinces reflects the politics of that period ...