Which Egyptian god most resembles a Supreme Original Lord?

[rakovsky]

Hello! Which Egyptian God in your mind most resembles the basic concept of God in His essence in the ancient Israelite religion, that is, a primeval, foundational God from prehistoric times who is uncreated, a creator, an supreme Lord of all? In case you don't see your answer in the poll above, please let me know wwhat other god, if any, you would pick.

Let's first consider a bit what prehistoric Egyptian religion was like. I will share with you a few things I found.

Prehistoric Religion

A stone circle from Nabta Playa in southern Egypt from the 7th to 5th millenia BC.
The circle is commonly considered to reflect astronomical observations

The Narmer Palette, found at Nekhen in Upper Egypt, is from the 1st dynasty in the 31st c. BC. It is commonly thought to show the victory of the pharaoh Narmer and of Upper Egypt over Lower Egypt, and to show the gods Horus (as a falcon) and Hathor (with a cow's head at the top of the [palette)

I also saw a bowl with the symbol of the goddess Neith from a prehistoric site in Egypt. On it was scratched what resembled an asterisk, the sign for her bow and arrows.

You can read about it on page 62 of this relevant article:

Before the Pyramids, the Origins of Egyptian Civilization
https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/oimp33.pdf


An essay on the "Animal Cults of Egypt" says that in late prehistory the Egyptians associated certain kinds of animals with gods and kept/domesticated and mummified the animals on their deaths.

There is really no evidence of very early animal cults during Egypt's neolithic period, but by the last centuries of prehistory, there can be scarcely any doubt that the Egyptians worshipped divine powers in animal form. While the earliest evidence of the cult surrounding the Apis bull dates to the reign of King Aha of the 1st Dynasty, various animal cults received considerable emphasis beginning with the twenty-sixth dynasty, perhaps as a part of a resurgence of Egyptian nationalism.

In reality, animals were rarely if ever worshipped as gods in ancient Egypt, but were instead thought of as manifestations of the gods. Like cult statues, they were actually one vehicle through which the gods could make their will manifest, and through which the faithful could demonstrate their devotion to the gods. Therefore, individual animals were cot considered gods, but the god could take up his abode in them and they become become an image of the god and a vessel for him.

Read more: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/animalcults.htm#ixzz4Fji640qR

An essay: "Egypt: Upper Egyptian Neolithic and Predynastic Religion and Rulers" talks about a culture of prehistoric Egyptians from the 5th to 4th centuries BC called the Amratians of the "Naqada I" period:

The Amratians

Each village had it's own animal deity which was identified with a clan ensign. From this came the different Egyptian nomes with their own local totems - the gods of the dynastic pantheon.

The artistic accomplishment of the people were given a chance to grow, and pottery decorated with animals, human figures hunting or worshiping and even papyrus bundle boats started appearing. So, too, did the female idol figures continue to grow - they appeared in greater numbers and in a wider variety, and bearded male figures started to appear on pendants and ivory sticks ("magic wands"). These last sets of human figures seems to have been of a magical or spiritual nature. In the Amratian graves, the deceased were buried with statuettes to keep him or her company in the afterlife. These were the forerunners of ushabti figures found in Egyptian tombs.

(SOURCE: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/predynastic.htm#ixzz4Fjlp1hLh)

This goes along with what the last essay said about people in prehistoric times associating animals with spirits.

Next it talks about a group of people from the 4th millenium BC called the Gerzean people who "introduced the images and totems of the falcon, symbol of the sun god Ra, and the cow, symbol of the love goddess Hathor." It adds that "In Nekhem (Hierakonpolis), the cult centre of Horus of Nekhem, there is a Naqada II palace and ritual precinct."

Finally, it talks about the Naqada III period leading up to the 1st Dynasty, noting how its rulers named themselves after Horus, and it explains how Egypt's pantheon may have grown as the empire united more territory:

The Naqada III had many territorial divisions, known as nomes. There were thirteen or so rulers at Nekhem, of which only the last few have been identified:

Horus "Crocodile", Horus Hat-Hor, Horus Iry-Hor, Horus Ka, Horus "Scorpion", Horus Narmer, "Baleful Catfish"

The rulers who named themselves after animals, were probably attempting to identify themselves with the divinity found in these animals. The rulers became the personification of the named animal-god, as later on the pharaohs were known as the "Son of Ra". These rulers also wore the white crown of Upper Egypt and were depicted as superhuman figures, giants who towered above mortal men.
...
Horus and Nekhbet, the vulture goddess of Al Kab, came to represent Upper Egypt. In Lower Egypt, Set and Udjo, the cobra goddess of Buto, were worshiped. In later Egyptian history, the vulture and cobra were united in the royal diadem, to represent dominion over both lands. So when Nekhem became the most powerful town, Horus became the god par excellence. The rulers started to identify themselves as the living embodiment of the hawk god.The growth of the Egyptian religion is one of the reasons why Egypt ended up with such a complex and polythestic religious system. When a town grew in prominence, so did the god. So it is that some of the ancient gods of Neolithic and Predynastic Egypt came to national prominence are considered to be some of the main gods in the Egyptian pantheon today: Amun of Thebes, Ptah of Hikuptah (Memphis), Horus (the Elder) of Nekhem, Set of Tukh (Ombos), Ra of Iunu (Heliopolis), Min of Gebtu (Koptos), Hathor of Dendra and Osiris of Abydos.

Some of these theories are educated guesses for the predynastic period, when it comes to the relationship between the gods and the animals or the pharaohs.

This is not a complete overview of the prehistoric religion, but it can be a starting point to understanding it as well as finding who they most saw as a Supreme Original Deity. I also don't want to restrict this question in the poll to the prehistoric period, but it's a factor to consider. That is, if a particular god comes from the prehistoric period (and there are others than those mentioned in the essays cited above), it's an indicator that it could be a good answer to the poll question.

Next I intend to describe two of the earliest gods, Neith and Nut, because of their special relation to the word for God in Egyptian, NTR.

 

[rakovsky]

Here are some reasons why I find the goddesses Neith and Nut to be especially interesting in relation to the Egyptian concept of God:

• They are two of the earliest known Egyptian deities
• Their name bears a striking resemblance to the Egyptian word for deity or God, NTR. The first two letters are the same in hieroglyphics, N and T. The R in NTR may be of secondary importance, because in late Egyptian, the R in NTR (god) was dropped and nowadays the native Egyptian word for God is Noute (in hieroglyphics NT)
• The etymological meaning of NTR has been lost or at least is debated, but a major clue for me is that in Sumerian, protoTurkic, proto-IndoEuropean, and ancient Chinese languages, the word for god is associated with or the same as the word for sky/heavens/star. In protoTurkic and Sumerian, this word is Tengir and Dingir, respectively, which etymologically somewhat resembles NTR (T and D are associated with eachother linguistically and here the T and N are reversed in order in making NTR)
• Continuing with the central association of god and heavens in words in those other ancient languages, we find that the word NTR resembles the heavens goddess Nut. And we also find out that at least some point in her development of her mythology, Neith was considered the goddess of the "unseen heavens."
• I also notice that the symbol for Neith, crossed arrows, perhaps with a bow Ж, bears a vague resemblance to the Sumerian sign for god, which looks like an eight pointed asterisk with what looks like arrows (although Neith's asterisk has six points). Here is the Sumerian sign for god, Dingir:
  
• In the story of Nut feeding the gods like a sow with piglets and in the story of her feeding the stars in the same way, we see an analogy between the stars and the gods. Just as the various gods matched to different elements or animals or objects (eg. Ra with the sun, Horus with the falcon), the gods in general match to the stars. And this again brings to mind the symbol of Dingir, which looks like a star. So just as in those other religions the gods are equated or associated with stars and God is associated with heaven in etymology, the same might be conjectured for NTR's etymology in Egyptian.

Here I would like to share with you what I found out about Neith.

A drawing of her

Neith commonly wears a weaving device on her head, because she is considered a goddess of weaving too.

Here is some basic information I found about her on the webpage "Neith, goddess of Egypt":

In her role as a warrior goddess she was believed to be the consort of Set, the god of war and hostility and the mother of the crocodile god Sobek, the patron of the Egyptian army and royal warriors. Neith was also a goddess of weaving, a funerary goddess, being linked to the linen of mummy bandages because she was associated with weaving.

Symbols: The bow emblem and a shield bearing crossed arrows, the Ankh and the Was Scepter
Cult Center: Sais, a famous ancient city in Lower Egypt

[Her Hieroglyphics name]

She was believed to be self-created and representative of the primordial waters of chaos and is linked with Set, the god of war and hostility who according to one creation myth was her consort and Sobek the crocodile god was their offspring. The hieroglyph and emblem for Neith, the Egyptian goddess of war, is a stylized depiction of a bow. The oldest hieroglyphs depicting bows were curved vertical depictions but as time passed this was changed to a horizontal depiction of a bow consisting of the curving horns of a scimitar oryx (a type of antelope) joined by a wooden centerpiece.

• Two Early Dynastic queens had names coupled with Neith - Neithhotep and Mernieth
  
• The High Priestesses who served the cults of Neith were called 'hemet netjer' meaning "wife of the gods"
• The ancient Greek goddess Athena was the Greek counterpart of Neith
• Her principal sanctuary was at Sais in the Nile delta, where she originally developed as a local goddess

http://www.landofpyramids.org/neith.htm

I find it relevant that the part above talks about Neith in relation to the queens - that they were using her name in their own. The essay also talked about a Festival of Lamps used to celebrate Neith, where they keep oil and salt in lamps throughout the night, especially in Sais. This festival reminds me of the bowl I saw with Neith's name on it from prehistoric Egyptian times, but that could just be a coincidence.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on her:

Neith (also spelled Nit, Net, or Neit)

Consort Khnum
Parents Nun and Mehet-Weret
Siblings Khnum
Offspring Sobek, Ra, Apep, Thoth, Serqet, Hathor

an early goddess in the Egyptian pantheon. She was the patron deity of Sais, where her cult was centered in the Western Nile Delta of Egypt ... Neith was a goddess of war and of hunting and had as her symbol, two arrows crossed over a shield. However, she is a far more complex goddess than is generally known, and of whom ancient texts only hint of her true nature. In her usual representations, she is portrayed as a fierce deity, a human female wearing the Red Crown, occasionally holding or using the bow and arrow, in others a harpoon. In fact, the hieroglyphs of her name are usually followed by a determinative containing the archery elements, with the shield symbol of the name being explained as either double bows (facing one another), intersected by two arrows (usually lashed to the bows), or by other imagery associated with her worship.

As a deity, Neith is normally shown carrying the was scepter (symbol of rule and power) and the ankh (symbol of life). She is also called such cosmic epithets as the "Cow of Heaven," a sky-goddess similar to Nut, and as the Great Flood, Mehet-Weret (MHt wr.t), as a cow who gives birth to the sun daily. In these forms, she is associated with creation of both the primeval time and daily "re-creation." As protectress of the Royal House, she is represented as a uraeus, and functions with the fiery fury of the sun, In time, this led to her being considered as the personification of the primordial waters of creation. She is identified as a great mother goddess in this role as a creator. As a female deity and personification of the primeval waters, Neith encompasses masculine elements, making her able to give birth (create) without the opposite sex. She is a feminine version of Ptah-Nun, with her feminine nature complemented with masculine attributes symbolized with her association with the bow and arrow. In the same manner, her personification as the primeval waters is Mehetweret (MHt wr.t), the Great Flood, conceptualized as streaming water, related to another use of the verb sti, meaning ‘to pour’."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neith

Here is where it talks about her as the "unseen sky:

Neith was considered to be eldest of the gods, and was appealed to as an arbiter in the dispute between Horus and Seth. Neith is said to have been "born the first, in the time when as yet there had been no birth." . In the Pyramid Texts, Neith is paired with Selket as braces for the sky, which places these two deities as the two supports for the heavens.... From predynastic and early dynasty periods, she was referred to as an "Opener of the Ways" (wp w3.wt) which may have referred not only to her leadership in hunting and war, but also as a psychopomp in cosmic and underworld pathways.

The main imagery of Neith as wp w3.wt was as deity of the unseen and limitless sky, as opposed to Nut and Hathor, who represented the manifested night and day skies, respectively. Her epithet as the "Opener of the Sun’s paths in all her stations" refers to how the sun is reborn (due to seasonal changes) at various points in the sky, beyond this world, of which only a glimpse is revealed prior to dawn and after sunset. It is at these changing points that Neith reigns as a form of sky goddess, where the sun rises and sets daily, or at its ‘first appearance’ to the sky above and below. It is at these points, beyond the sky that is seen, that her true power as deity who creates life is manifested. Georges St. Clair (Creation Records, 1898) noted that Neith is represented at times as a cow goddess with a line of stars across her back (as opposed to Nut’s representations with stars across the belly) [See el-Sayed, II, Doc. 644], and maintained this indicated the ancient goddess represents the full ecliptic circle around the sky (above and below), and is seen iconographically in texts as both the regular and the inverted determinative for the heavenly vault, indicating the cosmos below the horizon. St. Clair maintained it was this realm Neith personified, for she is the complete sky which surrounds the upper (Nut) and lower (Nunet?) sky, and which exists beyond the horizon, and thereby beyond the skies themselves. Neith, then, is that portion of the cosmos which is not seen, and in which the sun is reborn daily, below the horizon (which may reflect the statement assigned to Neith as "I come at dawn and at sunset daily").

As the goddess of creation and weaving, she was said to reweave the world on her loom daily. An interior wall of the temple at Esna records an account of creation in which Neith brings forth from the primeval waters of the Nun the first land. All that she conceived in her heart comes into being including the thirty gods. Having no known husband she has been described as "Virgin Mother Goddess":

• 
  
• Unique Goddess, mysterious and great who came to be in the beginning and caused everything to come to be . . . the divine mother of Ra, who shines on the horizon...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neith

The essay "Nit (Neith), Goddess of Weaving, War, Hunting and the Red Crown, Creator Deity, Mother of Ra" talks about the origin of her name and of how she was a creator goddess:

the goddess of the Red Crown of Lower Egypt and the patron goddess of Zau (Sau, Sai, Sais) in the Delta. In later times she was also thought to have been an androgynous demiurge - a creation deity - who had both male and female attributes. Generally depicted as a woman, Nit was shown either wearing her emblem - either a shield crossed with two arrows, or a weaving shuttle - or the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. Nit was probably linked with the crown of Lower Egypt due to the similarities between her name, and the name of the crown - nt .

(NT with the crown symbol)

Similarly, her name was linked to the root of the word for 'weave' - ntt (which is also the root for the word 'being').

(NTT)

She was also often shown carrying a bow and arrows, linking her to hunting and warfare, or a sceptre and sceptre and the ankh sign of life. She was also shown in the form of a cow, though this was very rare. In late dynastic times there is no doubt that Nit was regarded as nothing but a form of Hathor, but at an earlier period she was certainly a personification of a form of the great, inert, primeval watery mass out of which sprang the sun god Ra... -- The Gods of the Egyptians, E. A. Wallis Budge As the mother of Ra, the Egyptians believed her to be connected with the god of the watery primeval void, Nun.

(Her name might have also been linked to a word for water - nt - thus providing the connection between the goddess and the primeval waters.) Because the sun god arose from the primeval waters, and with Nit being these waters, she was thought to be the mother of the sun, and mother of the gods. She was called 'Nit, the Cow Who Gave Birth to Ra' as one of her titles. The evil serpent Apep, enemy of Ra, was believed to have been created when Nit spat into the waters of Nun, her spittle turning into the giant snake. As a creatrix, though, her name was written using the hieroglyph of an [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] phallus -

- a strong link to the male creative force a hint as to her part in the creation of the universe. According to the Iunyt (Esna) cosmology the goddess emerged from the primeval waters to create the world. She then followed the flow of the Nile northward to found Zau in company with the subsequently venerated lates-fish. There are much earlier references to Nit's association with the primordial flood-waters and to her demiurge:
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/nit.htm#ixzz4FaInumGF

Some special observations I have from the above is that she is described as an uncreated creator of gods and is associated with the heavens enough that stars are put on her back. Her personification of the primordial waters from which everything came, as well as the concept of the "unseen sky" is quite interesting too.

 

[rakovsky]

Next let's consider the goddess Nut, whose name also bears a resemblance to the word for god, NTR:

The essay below about her, called Nut/Nuit, explains how she was described sometimes as a cow goddess, as well as a god of rebirth as the leading sun god Ra went into her mouth at night and came out of her in the morning:

She is the daughter of Shu (god of air) and Tefnut (god of water and moisture)
Nuit is depicted as a woman wearing no clothes, covered with stars and supported by Shu; opposite her (the sky), is her husband, Geb (the Earth). With Geb, she was the mother of Osiris, Horus, Isis, Set, and Nephthys.
During the day, Nut and Geb are separated, but each evening Nut comes down to meet Geb and this causes darkness. If storms came during the day, it was believed that Nut had some how slipped closer to the Earth.
Nut is the barrier separating the forces of chaos from the ordered cosmos in this world.
Her fingers and toes were believed to touch the four cardinal points or directions.
The sun god Re was said to enter her mouth after setting in the evening and travel through her body during the night to be reborn from her vulva each morning.
She was also described as a cow goddess, taking on some of the attributes of Hathor. Geb was described as the "Bull of Nut" in the Pyramid Texts. As a great, solar cow, she was thought to have carried Ra up into the heavens on her back, after he retired from his rule on the Earth.

As a goddess who gave birth to the son each day, she became connected with the underworld, resurrection and the tomb. She was seen as a friend to the dead, as a mother-like protector to those who journeyed through the land of the dead. She was often painted on the inside lid of the sarcophagus, protecting the dead until he or she, like Ra, could be reborn in their new life.

http://www.crystalinks.com/nut.html

This is especially interesting because Neith, Nut, and Hathor were all portrayed at times as heavenly cow goddesses.

Next it explains that even though Ra/Khepera was sometimes called the "Creator of the Gods", in fact Ra had a creator or mother, Nut:

In the Book of the Dead, Nut was seen as a mother-figure to the sun god Ra, who at sunrise was known as Khepera and took the form of a scarab beetle (at noon he was Ra at his full strength, and at sunset he was known as Tem (Temu, Atem) who was old and weakening):

• Homage to thee, O thou who hast come as Khepera, Khepera the creator of the gods, Thou art seated on thy throne, thou risest up in the sky, illumining thy mother [Nut], thou art seated on thy throne as the king of the gods. [Thy] mother Nut stretcheth out her hands, and performeth an act of homage to thee....

There were many festivals to Nut through the year, including the 'Festival of Nut and Ra' and the 'Feast of Nut'. But, despite being a protector of the dead, she was a personification of the sky - a cosmic deity - and no temples or specific cult centers are linked to her.

She was thought to be the mother of five children on the five extra days of the Egyptian calendar, won by Thoth - Osiris who was born on the first day, Horus the Elder on the second,....
http://www.crystalinks.com/nut.html

That there are no temples dedicated to Nut is curious considering that there are temples for the other major deities of early Egypt: Horus, Hathor, Neith.

The story of creating 5 extra days is also interesting - the Egyptians theorized that the world originally had 360 days in its yearly revolution around the sun. 360 is a rounder, more "perfect" number, perhaps, in their mind.

The essay "Nut, goddess of Egypt" explains how unlike the uncreated goddess Neith, Nut had parents like the air god Shu:

Nut (pronounced Noot)
Nut and her consort and brother Geb, were totally inseparable leaving no space between the sky and the earth for Atum Ra to continue creating. On the orders of Atum, the father of Nut and Geb called Shu, forcibly separated the brother and sister, who were also husband and wife. Shu raised the goddess Nut up to form the sky. In the following picture Shu is depicted standing over the figure of Geb, struggling to get up to reach Nut. Shu prevents him and raises his arms to hold up the giant symbolic figure of Nut depicted as the sky.

As the mother of Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys Nut was regarded as the mother of the gods and of all things living. Nut and her husband Geb were considered to be the givers of food and water, not only to the living but also to the dead, which is why Nut is depicted with the water container on her head. In this role she is seen as a protector of the dead.

Nut is depicted in the picture with protected wings holding the ankh in both hands. The ankh was the key of life, that represented eternal life.

Symbols of Nut

• Crown, or headdress, is depicted as a water container reflecting her duty to provide water to the living and the dead
• One of her symbols was the sycamore tree which symbolized protection, divinity, eternity, and strength and is referred to in the Egyptian "Book of the Dead"

http://www.landofpyramids.org/nut.htm

So while Ra is considered the Creator of the gods, Nut is called their mother.

Wikipedia mentions a curious fact about her and Egyptian religion: While other religions had a mother earth goddess and a sky father god, in Egypt the genders were reversed and the main god of the sky was a woman, while the earth god Geb was a male:

The goddess Nut, wearing the water-pot sign (nw)
Name in hieroglyphs

Her name is translated to mean 'sky' and she is considered one of the oldest deities among the Egyptian pantheon, with her origin being found on the creation story of Heliopolis. She was originally the goddess of the nighttime sky,.... Her headdress was the hieroglyphic of part of her name, a pot, which may also symbolize the uterus.

Sky goddess Nut depicted as a cow

A sacred symbol of Nut was the ladder, used by Osiris to enter her heavenly skies. This ladder-symbol was called maqet and was placed in tombs to protect the deceased, and to invoke the aid of the deity of the dead. Nut and her brother, Geb, may be considered enigmas in the world of mythology. In direct contrast to most other mythologies which usually develop a sky father associated with an Earth mother (or Mother Nature), she personified the sky and he the Earth.

It can be said that she was a version of the great goddess Hathor. Like Hathor she not only had death and rebirth associations, but was the protector of children and the goddess of childbirth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut

The essay also brings out her relation to protecting the dead. Even though she did not have temples, her picture was common on tombs, since the Egyptians theorized that the dead ascended to heaven with the stars:

Nut was thought to draw the dead into her star-filled sky, and refresh them with food and wine: "I am Nut, and I have come so that I may enfold and protect you from all things evil." She was often painted on the inside lid of the sarcophagus, protecting the deceased. The vaults of tombs were often painted dark blue with many stars as a representation of Nut.

Book of Nut
The Book of Nut is a modern title of what was known in ancient times as The Fundamentals of the Course of the Stars. This is an important collection of ancient Egyptian astronomical texts, perhaps the earliest of several other such texts, going back at least to 2,000 BC. Nut, being the sky goddess, plays the big role in the Book of Nut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut

An image of Nut superimposed on the milky way, with the yellow circle representing the sun's direction in its rotation around the earth during the day during an equinox.

This essay mentions how the Egyptians may have conceived of Nut based on the way the Milky Way looks in the sky:

Intriguingly, it has been suggested that her most typical form – a body stretched out across the sky, with her feet touching the eastern horizon and her arms the western horizon – was inspired by the Milky Way, which, in Egypt on the night before the winter solstice, would have looked very much like such a stretched out figure. The fact that the sun would have then emerged from roughly the position of the goddess’s vagina would have strengthened the correspondence. At the spring equinox, furthermore, the sun would have set where the head of such a figure would have been.

http://egyptianmythology.org/gods-and-goddesses/nut/

As a sow who nursed and swallowed the stars, I see how this image of her as a sow could reflect an idea of the stars being related to the gods (eg. the sun and Ra):

Attributes: Nut was originally a mother-goddess who had many children. The hieroglyph for her name, which she is often seen wearing on her head is a water pot, but it is also thought to represent a womb.

... She is also pictured as a giant sow, suckling many piglets. These piglets represented the stars, which she swallowed each morning before dawn. Nut was considered to be the mother of the sun and the moon. In some cases she took the form of a great cow who's eyes represented the sun and the moon.

http://www.egyptartsite.com/nut.html

Here you can read the parallel story with her swallowing the gods:

Every new day, she would give birth to her son, the sun, who would begin his journey over her outstretched body and arrive at her mouth. She would then proceed to swallow him, and he would vanish inside of her until his rebirth the next day…
The stars shared a similar fate. Every night, as dawn was about to break, Nut would swallow the stars, only to give birth to them again in the evening.
Geb, was angered that his wife would eat her own children and compared her to a sow that eats her own offspring. Their father was quick to reassure Geb that this was actually a good thing, as it offered the opportunity for rebirth.

http://www.experience-ancient-egypt...ptian-gods-and-goddesses/egyptian-goddess-nut

Finally, I would like to cite one of the oldest known literature in the world, the Pyramid texts in what they have to say about Nut. In this case, the deceased Pharaoh was named Pepi and the literature addresses her in a kind of poem:

The Pyramid Texts have been called the oldest religious literature in the world. They are comprised of text carved on the walls of pyramids at Sakkara (Old Kingdom) as well as the sarcophagi inside. They were reserved for the sole use of the pharaoh and have a collection of spells and incantations, called “utterances”, that are to be recited in order to help the king in his journey to the afterlife.

The Pyramid Texts – Hymn to Nut, the Sky-Goddess

• O Nut, you have extended yourself over your son the Osiris Pepi,
• You have snatched him out of the hand of Set; join him to yourself, Nut.
• You came, snatch your son; behold, you came, form this great one [like] unto yourself.

Burial Chamber of Pepi I (reigned 2332 – 2287 BC) with pyramid texts

To summarize some important points, Nut was the mother of the gods and stars, she swallowed and gave rebirth to them and to the sun-god Ra, who was one of the leading gods.
This brings out an analogy between the gods and the stars, something that seems to relate to the sign for the gods in Sumerian religion, which looks like a star or eight-axeled asterisk.
And she was one of the oldest gods, her name is in some of the world's oldest surviving literature.[/quote][/quote]

 

[rakovsky]

In these descriptions of Neith and Nut as cow goddesses of the sky, we can see major similarity to two other Egyptian goddesses, Mehet-Weret (meaning Great Flood) and Hathor (meaning mansion of Horus). In fact, we found that Neith was at times even called Meheret-Weret. And the reference to "mansion of Horus" , we can find the idea that Nut swallowed Ra at night, essentially becoming his "mansion". This is because like Ra, the god Horus was closely associated with the sun.

This brings up my pet theory for the meaning of God in Egyptian, NTR, which has not been deciphered by modern Egyptologists. The Egyptians thought that God could be combined, probably because they thought that the God were emanations or aspects of the one true God. So Amun + Ra became Amun-Ra. Perhaps something similar happened with NTR? Perhaps NTR really comes from a combination of NT and R, that is, the leading gods Neith/Nut and Ra?

In Egyptian mythology, a kind of combination does happen every day when Horus is in Hathor's mansion, or when Nut swallows Ra. Supposing that Nut (sky) has a key relationship to the concept of God in Egyptian mythology like it did in other ancient religions of that era (eg. Sumeria), perhaps the R added on to Nut can be explained by Ra's combination with Nut in the mythology?

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

It depends upon the period.

The later Israelite God I would say resembles the Aten most closely in its monotheistic life-giving attributes.

It also depends what Egyptian religious thought you are referencing. It was in no way a monolithic or precise system with a wide variety of conceptions tolerated. The Heliopolitan conception of Ra as supreme god is also quite close , but the more Horus based or Osirian ideas of Ra is not that close at all. Likewise Atum if associated with Ra as Atum-Re is a probable candidate, but as solely Atum, his creator attributes are more based on the primordial mound itself, the idea of creation appearing from the water like the fields after the annual flood. This is not as close an association I would think and still constitutes a physical beginning, even if he is self-created.

The earlier conceptions of God descending from Seir and being represented by storms and thick cloud perhaps point to similarity with Set (as YHWH was later associated with Baal and El in the Northern Kingdom and Baal was associated with Set, especially amongst semitic peoples in the delta). Set was seen as a bringer of plague, sterility and the desert, but was basically a storm god who can also withhold these things. As the Egyptians had little use for rain, this aspect was not emphasised too much. It is only in the late period and end of the New Kingdom that Set was demonised in Egypt, as can be seen from pharoanic names like Seti that invoke him.

The arguments above for Neith and Nut are more etymologically based it seems. The substantial problem here is that it puts the cart before the horses, assuming an unproven association between NTR and Dingir, Tengri etc. and then assumes NTR to derive from a combination of them with Ra, therefore theorising that these 'sky gods' are therefore associated with aspects of the supreme god or Summus Dei idea. While interesting, it is highly suppositional and quite frankly unprovable. If we go with solely the information we do have for Neith and Nut, they do not seem very viable candidates for an Israelitish God in my opinion. Only if we assume quite a lot of theorising is true and associate them with Ra, do we approach this, but I do not see much support for this. But one never knows, every now and then some new texts come to light.

 

[gord44]

Horus. The warmaster really had the look even though his heresy ultimately failed.

Let the Galaxy burn. - Horus

 

[Fizzywig]

Horus. The warmaster really had the look even though his heresy ultimately failed.

Let the Galaxy burn. - Horus

Horus...........yes, all the early signs were there.

 

[rakovsky]

Horus. The warmaster really had the look even though his heresy ultimately failed.

Let the Galaxy burn. - Horus

 

[rakovsky]

Thank you for your thoughtful replies, Quid.

It depends upon the period.

The later Israelite God I would say resembles the Aten most closely in its monotheistic life-giving attributes.

There is a major correspondence between the two in that they were both monotheistic systems. Within the theology that Akhenaten proposed, there is not really another option for choosing a different god to be closer to Yahweh, or for that matter to any other god.

There are two weaknesses for this argument or uncertainties I have about this.
First, did Akhenaten think that there was a sentient conscious Spirit Being (as in the Christian saying that the preincarnate "God is a Spirit") called "Aten"? Or did his religion worship the material, non-conscious sun disc, "the Aten", similar to worshiping the sun or any other object? I suppose the former, because there would not seem to be a purpose in worshiping an object that doesn't understand you are worshiping it.

And yet the Aten is not portrayed as a person in their art, only as an object with hands/rays.

Second, supposing that there is a major similarity, the weakness I see would be in how representative it is of Egyptian religion. Akhenaten ruled in 1336 BC or 1334 BC when he instituted worship of Aten. But Egyptian religion had existed for millenia before that. We have hieroglyphics showing religious ideas going back to prehistoric times. It would be kind of like considering whether "Buddhism" was part of ancient Hinduism. The Buddha came from Hindu culture and formed his ideas in it. And Buddha kept a place in some Hindu sects, I think as an "avatar." But people commonly separate Buddhism and Hinduism.

"Aten" is a rational answer though, so I listed it in the poll.

It also depends what Egyptian religious thought you are referencing. It was in no way a monolithic or precise system with a wide variety of conceptions tolerated. The Heliopolitan conception of Ra as supreme god is also quite close , but the more Horus based or Osirian ideas of Ra is not that close at all. Likewise Atum if associated with Ra as Atum-Re is a probable candidate, but as solely Atum, his creator attributes are more based on the primordial mound itself, the idea of creation appearing from the water like the fields after the annual flood. This is not as close an association I would think and still constitutes a physical beginning, even if he is self-created.

You are right, there are lots of concepts, and I see that Atum is different than Atum-Ra as a concept.

The earlier conceptions of God descending from Seir and being represented by storms and thick cloud perhaps point to similarity with Set (as YHWH was later associated with Baal and El in the Northern Kingdom and Baal was associated with Set, especially amongst semitic peoples in the delta). Set was seen as a bringer of plague, sterility and the desert, but was basically a storm god who can also withhold these things. As the Egyptians had little use for rain, this aspect was not emphasised too much. It is only in the late period and end of the New Kingdom that Set was demonised in Egypt, as can be seen from pharoanic names like Seti that invoke him.

I think what you are doing is you are looking to what God Yahweh was related to in the Mesopotamian pantheon and then seeing if there is an equivalent in the Egyptian one. So for example you associate him with Baal and El.

This is a rational strategy that you have, and indeed I do think that Israelite concepts of God have a major correlation to what we find in earlier periods' writings by earlier societies like the Babylonians.
My personal view is that while I can see an origin in those earlier Babylonian beliefs, then even if we would find the same name and some similar traits, they don't seem to quite line up enough to propose that Yahweh correlates to God Yahweh in Mesopotamian tribe Y's pantheon X.

For example, the Sumerians believed that the heavens god An gave birth to the leading god Enlil, and in practice Enlil became a leading center of attention in Sumerian mythology. The Babylonians respected Sumer so much that they used Sumerian as a religious language kind of like Catholics and 16th. c. Protestants (even the Anglicans, Luther and Calin) using Latin or Messianic Christians using Hebrew. Babylonians might change the myths a bit, but when they talked about El, they were talking about Enlil.

I think with the Bible things are different. The Bible might call God El or Elohim, and sometimes it calls him Yah (eg in Jeremiah), but things do not line up. For one, Yah and El were different Mesopotamian Gods, but in the Bible they are one. And I am very skeptical in thinking that Yahweh-Elohim was generated from the heavens god An like the Hebrews thought that they were.

Etymologically and maybe even historically, Elohim might match up with Enlil (eg. Abraham's predecessors might have focused worship on Enlil the most), but theoretically I find him to line up better with An as a supreme quintessential original deity.

The arguments above for Neith and Nut are more etymologically based it seems. The substantial problem here is that it puts the cart before the horses, assuming an unproven association between NTR and Dingir, Tengri etc. and then assumes NTR to derive from a combination of them with Ra, therefore theorising that these 'sky gods' are therefore associated with aspects of the supreme god or Summus Dei idea. While interesting, it is highly suppositional and quite frankly unprovable. If we go with solely the information we do have for Neith and Nut, they do not seem very viable candidates for an Israelitish God in my opinion. Only if we assume quite a lot of theorising is true and associate them with Ra, do we approach this, but I do not see much support for this. But one never knows, every now and then some new texts come to light.

It's true that for Neith and Nut I was making an etymological case. But also I see a correlation that is strengthened if we consider two more deities, the Celestial Cow Mehet-Weret and Hathor. The reason is that Neith was seen as the Celestial Cow, even though the Celestial Cow was other times described as her mother. All four of these goddesses were at various times described as this great sky cow goddess, suggesting that perhaps they were versions or varieties of each other. And when we consider that Neith or Mehet-Weret were uncreated, or that Hathor was a chief goddess, or that Nut was the mother of the gods, all these descriptions make a case stronger than an etymological one, but point to two things: a conceptual similarity to the Primeval Sky Fathers of the other religions (eg. Dingir or Dyeus Pater), and an aspect of supremacy, uncreatedness or Creative-ness that exists independent of their analogies to those other gods (eg. regardless of the speculative connection to Dingir). In a subsequent message I would like to write a bit about those two other goddesses, Mehet-Weret and Hathor to show their relevance.

 

[rakovsky]

Here I would like to write a bit about Mehet-Weret and Hathor as I mentioned above.

Mehet-Weret

Meht-urt (Mehet-weret) seated with the hawk-head of Horus before her, on a watery dais representing the heavenly flood-water. Before her are two lions flanking a dawning sun disk rising between two mountain peaks. An Ankh symbolic of "life" is beneath the sun disk. (cf. p.152. Adel Mahmoud. "The Sarchopagus of Khonsu" [19th Dynasty, 1295-1186 BCE]. Eric Hornung & Betsy M. Bryan. Editors. The Quest for Immortality, Treasures of Ancient Egypt. Washington, D.C. National Gallery of Art. 2002). In Egyptian myths Horus was identified with the sun. Perhaps Horus' head rising out of the floodwater dais recalls his birth at dawn as the Golden Calf born of the heavenly watery-cow-sky-goddess ?

http://www.bibleorigins.net/Meht-urtGreatFlood.html

The Bible Origins article on Mehet-Weret above makes an interesting note about a theory by Christian Egyptologist E.Budge:

Sometimes Nut appears as a golden sky-cow with stars on her body (note the stars on human form of Nut in this mural) with the solar bark sailing along her body. E.A. Wallis Budge understood that Nut was the feminine form of the god Nu or Nuu who was the primeval waters from which arose all life including the gods. He thus argued that Nut's name implied she was a goddess of the heavenly waters.

The heavenly waters bring to mind the concept in the Bible (in Genesis 1 and in the story of the Great Flood) and in Babylonian mythology that there were waters above the heavens. Budge's association of Nut with the waters above the heavens brings to mind a bit the idea of Nut as the goddess of the unseen heavens.

From the "Ancient Egypt and Archaeology Web Site", which talks about the bust above, you can see the close connection between Mehet-Weret, the "mother of Ra" Nut, and Hathor:

The piece represents Mehit-Weret, an aspect of the cow-headed goddess Hathor. Hathor was the goddess of Joy and love, who welcomed the setting sun and the spirits of the dead into the underworld.
Mehit-Weret (Cow goddess of the sky). Her name means 'great flood'. In the Pyramid Era Mehet-Weret represents the waterway in the heavens, sailed upon by both the sun-god and the king. She is also a manifestation of the primeval waters - consequently being sometimes considered as the 'mother of Re'. From vignettes in the New Kingdom funerary papyri the goddess is pictured as a cow lying on a reed mat with a sun disk between her horns.

http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/luxor_museum/pages/From Tut's Tomb, MEHIT-WERET 2.htm


The essay "Cow of Gold" explains a bit what the name refers to:

Mehet-Weret was a goddess of the sky, and represented the waterway in the heavens, sailed upon by both the sun god and the king. The Egyptians called the Milky Way the “Nile in the Sky,” and believed it to flow from the udders of Mehet-Weret. Mehet-Weret was also a goddess of Akhet, the yearly inundation of the Nile.

As a goddess of water, she not only traveled on the water, taking the pharaoh and sun god with her, she was also thought to be able to bring life-giving water to Egypt. Sometimes Mehet-Weret appears in birthing scenes as a herald of imminent birth. The Great Flood is when the waters of the ammonitic sac break to signal that the child will soon emerge.

https://cowofgold.wikispaces.com/Mehet-Weret

You can see the hieroglyphic derived from water in her name:

(written as a single line left to right)

Another article cites the Book of the Dead as saying that Mehet-Weret was either the heavenly waters or else the image of Ra's/Horus' eye:

the goddess of streaming water, a goddess related to creation and to rebirth. Her name means "Great Flood" or "Great Tide", linking her with water and the primeval waters of Nun. In the Old Kingdom, she was believed to have helped the pharaoh and Re reach the sky, by way of the Nile in the underworld.

"I behold Ra who was born yesterday from the thighs of the goddess Mehet-Weret; his strength is my strength, and my strength is his strength." Who is this? "Mehet-Weret is the great Celestial Water, but others say that Mehet-Weret is the image of the Eye of Ra at dawn at his birth daily. "[Others, however, say that] Mehet-Weret is the Wedjat (Eye of Horus or Ra)." -- The Book of the Dead

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/mehetweret.htm#ixzz4Fqf39k3v

Wikipedia discusses the association mentioned above that some Egyptians made between Mehet-Weret and the sky cow Hathor on one hand and Wedjet (the eye of Horus) on the other:

An interpretation of the Milky Way was that it was the primal snake, Wadjet, the protector of Egypt. In this interpretation she was closely associated with Hathor and other early deities among the various aspects of the great mother goddess, including Mut and Naunet. The association with Hathor brought her son Horus into association also. The cult of Ra absorbed most of Horus's traits and included the protective eye of Wadjet that had shown her association with Hathor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadjet

Repeatedly we find aspects similar to Nut and Hathor:

As a goddess of water, she not only traveled on the water, taking the pharaoh or sun god with her, but she was thought to be able bring life-giving water to Egypt. She was a goddess of the yearly inundation of the Nile River, as indicated by her name, and so was linked to both the Nile in Egypt, and the Nile in the underworld, and the Nile in the sky (the Milky Way).

As a goddess of rebirth, she was not only thought to give birth to the sun daily, but she was thought to be able to help with rebirth into the afterlife. Like Nut, she was thought to give daily birth to the sun. She was closely linked to Nit [Neith], who was depicted as a cow goddess of creation and known as 'The Cow Who Gave Birth to Ra'. When Mehen-Weret gave birth to Re at creation, she was thought to have put him, in the form of a sun disk, between her horns, which is why she is shown wearing the headdress of Hathor.
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/mehetweret.htm#ixzz4FqjATEJz

It's also interesting that like Nut, Mehet-Weret did not have any cult centers, although that might be because the cow goddess was not conceived of as a deity separate from Hathor but as a description of those other goddesses:

...this ancient cow goddess appears to have had no independent cult of her own, and was likely a conceptual figure of primeval creation; it is presumed that Hathor absorbed most of her sky attributes as early as the Old Kingdom, as exhibited by the many references of the two as identical in both the Pyramid and Coffin Texts.

She was a goddess originally from Zau (Sau, Sai, Sais) and liked to Nit [Neith] at Iunyt (Esna). She was written about in the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and in The Book of the Dead. She had no known following, although she was an ancient goddess, possibly from pre-dynastic times. It is possible that any early cult of Mehet-Weret changed to that of Hathor, when she was fused to the goddess of love.

Read more: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/mehetweret.htm#ixzz4FqmqcKsb

The main take away here is the importance of the concept of the heavens and the heavenly waters in the Egyptian concept of the heavens goddesses Neith, Nut, and Hathor and their close, overlapping association and descriptions of each other. In each we see these ideas of being the Milky Way and of rebirth of heavenly beings (including the deceased) and of bearing Horus/Ra/the sun.

 

[rakovsky]

Now I'd like to share what I found on the last of these four heavens goddesses, Hathor:

Hathor

Hathor as a cow

Wikipedia says that her name literally means "mansion of Horus" and that her pictoral sign is horus (a falcon) inside a mansion (a square with a smaller square on the edge):

Hathor (meaning "mansion of Horus") is an Ancient Egyptian goddess who personified the principles of joy, feminine love, and motherhood. She was one of the most important and popular deities throughout the history of Ancient Egypt. Hathor was worshiped by royalty and common people alike in whose tombs she is depicted as "Mistress of the West" welcoming the dead into the next life. In other roles she was a goddess of music, dance, foreign lands and fertility who helped women in childbirth, as well as the patron goddess of miners. The cult of Hathor predates the historic period, and the roots of devotion to her are therefore difficult to trace, though it may be a development of predynastic cults which venerated fertility, and nature in general, represented by cows.

Hathor is commonly depicted as a cow goddess with horns in which is set a sun disk with Uraeus. Twin feathers are also sometimes shown in later periods as well as a menat necklace. Hathor may be the cow goddess who is depicted from an early date on the Narmer Palette and on a stone urn dating from the 1st dynasty that suggests a role as sky-goddess and a relationship to Horus who, as a sun god, is "housed" in her. The Ancient Egyptians viewed reality as multi-layered in which deities who merge for various reasons, while retaining divergent attributes and myths, were not seen as contradictory but complementary. In a complicated relationship Hathor is at times the mother, daughter and wife of Ra and, like Isis, is at times described as the mother of Horus, and associated with Bast.

Early Depictions
A stone urn recovered from Hierakonpolis and dated to the first dynasty has on its rim the face of a cow deity with stars on its ears and horns that may relate to Hathor's, or Bat's, role as a sky-goddess.[6] Depictions exist with bilateral Wadjet eyes in the sky representing Hathor as sky goddess. Another artifact from the first dynasty shows a cow lying down on an ivory engraving with the inscription "Hathor in the Marshes" indicating her association with vegetation and the papyrus marsh in particular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor

Since the image of Hathor as a cow lying in a marsh goes back to the 1st dynasty, an image that reminds me of that of Mehet-Weret, we can see that the association probably goes back to prehistoric times.

Wikipedia explains this relationship in more detail:

Hathor, along with the goddess Nut, was associated with the Milky Way during the third millennium B.C. when, during the fall and spring equinoxes, it aligned over and touched the earth where the sun rose and fell.[13] The four legs of the celestial cow represented Nut or Hathor could, in one account, be seen as the pillars on which the sky was supported with the stars on their bellies constituting the Milky Way on which the solar barque of Ra, representing the sun, sailed.[14]



The Milky Way seen as it may have appeared to Ancient Egyptians

The Milky Way was seen as a waterway in the heavens, sailed upon by both the sun deity and the moon, leading the ancient Egyptians to describe it as The Nile in the Sky.[15] Due to this, and the name mehturt, she was identified as responsible for the yearly inundation of the Nile. Another consequence of this name is that she was seen as a herald of imminent birth, as when the amniotic sac breaks and floods its waters, it is a medical indicator that the child is due to be born extremely soon.

Temples



Dendera Temple, showing Hathor on the capitals of a column.
As Hathor's cult developed from prehistoric cow cults it is not possible to say conclusively where devotion to her first took place. Dendera in Upper Egypt was a significant early site where she was worshiped as "Mistress of Dendera".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor

Another essay on Hathor on Ancient Egypt Online explains the same association or equation of the various sky goddesses, as well as the meaning of the "Milky Way" as "milky":

She was originally a personification of the Milky Way, which was considered to be the milk that flowed from the udders of a heavenly cow (linking her with Nut, Bat and Mehet-Weret). As "the Mistress of Heaven" she was associated with Nut, Mut and the Queen. While as "the Celestial Nurse" she nursed the Pharaoh in the guise of a cow or as a sycamore fig (because it exudes a white milky substance). As "the Mother of Mothers" she was the goddess of women, fertility, children and childbirth. She had power over anything having to do with women from problems with conception or childbirth, to health and beauty and matters of the heart.

Her traditional votive offering was two mirrors and she was often depicted on mirrors and cosmetic palettes. Yet she was not considered to be vain or shallow, rather she was assured of her own beauty and goodness and loved beautiful and good things. She was known as "the mistress of life" and was seen as the embodiment of joy, love, romance, perfume, dance, music and alcohol. Because of her role in helping the dead, she often appears on sarcophagi with Nut (the former on top of the lid, the later under the lid).

http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/hathor.html

I would also note that just as Neith was linked with queens, so was Hathor:

Her husband Horus the elder was associated with the pharaoh, so Hathor was associated with the Queen. Her name is translated as "The House of Horus", which refers both to the sky (where Horus lived as a Hawk) and to the royal family. She had a son named Ihy (who was a god of music and dancing) with Horus-Behdety and the three were worshipped at Denderah (Iunet). However, her family relationships became increasingly confusing as time passed. She was probably first considered to be the wife of Horus the elder and the daughter of Ra, but when Ra and Horus were linked as the composite deity Re-Horakty she became both the wife and the daughter of Ra.

http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/hathor.html

In the ancient Chinese religion, the emperor was considered the "son of Tien", the son of God/Heaven. If we look to an analogy in Egyptian religion, we find the queen being associated with Hathor/Neith and the king with Horus/Ra. This is another sign that these gods in Egypt were considered analogous in their leading role to the chief deities in other ancient religions.

Another essay I found repeats the same kind of ideas that we have been discussing with regard to the description of the "Great Flood" cow's portrayal as having the sun between her horns, and with regard to Horus/Ra going inside of Neith/Nut/Mehet-Weret:

She is closely associated with the primeval divine cow Mehet-Weret, a sky goddess whose name means "Great Flood" and who was thought to bring the inundation of the Nile River which fertilized the land. Through this association, Hathor came to be regarded as the mother of the sun god Ra and held a prominent place in his barge as it sailed across the night sky, into the underworld, and rose again at dawn. Her name means "Domain of Horus" or "Temple of Horus" which alludes to two concepts. The first allusion is to the part of the sky where the king (or dead king) could be rejuvenated and continue rule (or live again) while the second is to the myth that Horus, as sun god, entered her mouth each night to rest and returned with the dawn. In both cases, her name has to do with re-birth, rejuvenation, inspiration, and light.

She was always, from the earliest times, associated with women and women's health in body and in mind.

... "She was most commonly shown as a beautiful woman wearing a red solar disk between a pair of cow's horns"

http://www.ancient.eu/Hathor

One more thing about Hathor though that initially in my mind quite set her apart from the other concepts of a sky cow goddess was the myth of Ra sending her to massacre people in the form of Sekmet, a warrior goddess whose name means "the one who is powerful":

Although in time she came to be considered the ultimate personification of kindness and love, she was initially literally a blood-thirsty deity unleashed on mankind to punish humans for their sins. An ancient tale similar to that of the biblical flood tells of the great god Ra becoming enraged at human ingratitude and evil and releasing [Hathor in the form of] Sekhmet upon humanity to destroy them. Sekhmet descends on the world in a fury of destruction, killing everyone she finds and toppling their cities, crushing their homes and tearing up fields and gardens. At first, Ra is pleased because humanity had forgotten him and the gifts of the gods and had turned to only thinking of themselves and following after their own pleasure. He watches Sekhmet's swath of destruction with satisfaction until the other gods intervene and ask him to show mercy.

Ra regrets his decision and devises a plan to stop Sekhmet's blood lust. He orders Tenenet, the Egyptian goddess of beer, to brew a particularly strong batch and then has the beer dyed red and delivered to Dendera. Sekhmet, by this time, is crazed with the thirst for more blood and, when she comes upon the blood-red beer, she quickly seizes it and begins drinking.

She becomes drunk, falls asleep, and wakes up as Hathor the benevolent. Humanity was spared destruction and their former tormentor became their greatest benefactress. Following her transformation, Hathor bestowed only beautiful and uplifting gifts on the children of the earth and assumed such high status that all the later goddesses of Egypt can be considered forms of Hathor.

http://www.ancient.eu/Hathor

However, on further reflection this does not necessarily separate her so strongly from Meret-Weret or Neith, or for that matter present a story totally unconnected to Biblical narratives. First of all, one of Neith's principle descriptions is as a warrior, like Hathor is described in this myth. Secondly, in Genesis in the Bible, a "Great Flood" is similarly sent by God to destroy almost all mankind because of humanity's sins, and in the Bible, the heavens open up and the water above the firmament pours through its gates. "Meret Weret" literally means "Great Flood", so if we see the story of Hathor's destruction as analogous to the Biblical Great Flood, we can see how Meret-Weret actually fits into this myth, rather than the myth being in conflict.

So in conclusion, key reasons for seeing Hathor as a supreme or chief deity are her status as the mother or wife of the leading deity Horus, her associations with the "milky way" galaxy, with the "primeval divine cow Mehet-Weret," and with Egypt's queens. Her status is strengthened if she is seen as another version or depiction of the goddesses Neith or Nut, who are other important deities. To say that these four goddesses are just different depictions, versions, or terms for each other practically combines their strongest qualities to make them as a whole very important.

Some weaknesses in equating her, or for that matter Nut or Neith, with the Supreme Lord, is that in Egypt the chief ruler on earth was the pharaoh, a male, while Hathor/Neith was associated with the queen. And in Israelite religion and the other major religions of that time, the supreme God was also male. There is a small weakness in such an objection though in that as mentioned earlier Neith was sometimes portrayed as androgynous or having a phallus as a Creator.

Another problem is that Israelite religion disagrees with portraying God as a cow. It may not be a coincidence that when the Israelites were leaving Egypt, after they crossed the Red Sea, in the Sinai they made an idol of a golden calf and said that this was the God who had rescued them. This image of a golden calf brings to mind a bit Hathor, and scholars say that in fact there was a temple to Hathor with a cow idol made by the Egyptians in the Sinai in that era. If Hathor was a chief god it could explain why the Israelites might think that their chief god looked this way. Nonetheless, the Bible clearly generally describes God as human-like more than any animal, and never Himself as female (although the Holy Spirit is female in Hebrew). So the idea of a female cow appears foreign to the Biblical concept of God, and to the concepts of the supreme God of Sumeria and of China.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Thank you for your thoughtful replies, Quid.


There is a major correspondence between the two in that they were both monotheistic systems. Within the theology that Akhenaten proposed, there is not really another option for choosing a different god to be closer to Yahweh, or for that matter to any other god.

There are two weaknesses for this argument or uncertainties I have about this.
First, did Akhenaten think that there was a sentient conscious Spirit Being (as in the Christian saying that the preincarnate "God is a Spirit") called "Aten"? Or did his religion worship the material, non-conscious sun disc, "the Aten", similar to worshiping the sun or any other object? I suppose the former, because there would not seem to be a purpose in worshiping an object that doesn't understand you are worshiping it.

And yet the Aten is not portrayed as a person in their art, only as an object with hands/rays.

As I understand Atenism, the Aten was seen as a living being, in fact the embodiment of life. To consider a god not a person would be foreign to Egyptian thought which personified everything right down to regal power and the throne itself (Isis).
However, look at the devotion that Pure Land Buddhists show to Amitabha, who is in fact not a person but an abstract philosophical construction. Fizzywig posts repeated threads here with multiple such quotations. Impersonality is no impediment.

Second, supposing that there is a major similarity, the weakness I see would be in how representative it is of Egyptian religion. Akhenaten ruled in 1336 BC or 1334 BC when he instituted worship of Aten. But Egyptian religion had existed for millenia before that. We have hieroglyphics showing religious ideas going back to prehistoric times. It would be kind of like considering whether "Buddhism" was part of ancient Hinduism. The Buddha came from Hindu culture and formed his ideas in it. And Buddha kept a place in some Hindu sects, I think as an "avatar." But people commonly separate Buddhism and Hinduism.

"Aten" is a rational answer though, so I listed it in the poll.

The Aten predates Akhenaton. We see it in his father's barque for instance. Aten was a derivitive of Heliopolitan sun worship, essentially an aspect of Ra. Heliopolitan priests had been treating Ra as supreme and perhaps the embodiment of other gods for millenia. Akhenaton's revolution was merely bringing this to its logical conclusion.

I think what you are doing is you are looking to what God Yahweh was related to in the Mesopotamian pantheon and then seeing if there is an equivalent in the Egyptian one. So for example you associate him with Baal and El.

This is a rational strategy that you have, and indeed I do think that Israelite concepts of God have a major correlation to what we find in earlier periods' writings by earlier societies like the Babylonians.
My personal view is that while I can see an origin in those earlier Babylonian beliefs, then even if we would find the same name and some similar traits, they don't seem to quite line up enough to propose that Yahweh correlates to God Yahweh in Mesopotamian tribe Y's pantheon X.

For example, the Sumerians believed that the heavens god An gave birth to the leading god Enlil, and in practice Enlil became a leading center of attention in Sumerian mythology. The Babylonians respected Sumer so much that they used Sumerian as a religious language kind of like Catholics and 16th. c. Protestants (even the Anglicans, Luther and Calin) using Latin or Messianic Christians using Hebrew. Babylonians might change the myths a bit, but when they talked about El, they were talking about Enlil.

I think with the Bible things are different. The Bible might call God El or Elohim, and sometimes it calls him Yah (eg in Jeremiah), but things do not line up. For one, Yah and El were different Mesopotamian Gods, but in the Bible they are one. And I am very skeptical in thinking that Yahweh-Elohim was generated from the heavens god An like the Hebrews thought that they were.

Etymologically and maybe even historically, Elohim might match up with Enlil (eg. Abraham's predecessors might have focused worship on Enlil the most), but theoretically I find him to line up better with An as a supreme quintessential original deity.

We have had this discussion before. I do not hold to the derivation of YHWH from El or Yahu of Ebla or any Sumerian conception nor did the Sumerians have a supreme quintessential original god idea or at least not one on record.
The archaeological record does not support this.
I hold to YHWH deriving from the Shasu of YHW in Sinai, which lines up well with the Biblical account.

My strategy was to look at God's characteristics in the Old Testament and equate them with known Egyptian gods and Set came quite high on my list. I offered the association of Set with Baal and El to show that the Egyptians and Canaanites would also see a similarity. It was further support, not derivation.

It's true that for Neith and Nut I was making an etymological case. But also I see a correlation that is strengthened if we consider two more deities, the Celestial Cow Mehet-Weret and Hathor. The reason is that Neith was seen as the Celestial Cow, even though the Celestial Cow was other times described as her mother. All four of these goddesses were at various times described as this great sky cow goddess, suggesting that perhaps they were versions or varieties of each other. And when we consider that Neith or Mehet-Weret were uncreated, or that Hathor was a chief goddess, or that Nut was the mother of the gods, all these descriptions make a case stronger than an etymological one, but point to two things: a conceptual similarity to the Primeval Sky Fathers of the other religions (eg. Dingir or Dyeus Pater), and an aspect of supremacy, uncreatedness or Creative-ness that exists independent of their analogies to those other gods (eg. regardless of the speculative connection to Dingir). In a subsequent message I would like to write a bit about those two other goddesses, Mehet-Weret and Hathor to show their relevance.

I understand your case, I just think it highly speculative.
As to Dingir, as I told you in your previous thread on this sort of topic, Dingir is not a specific god nor does it justify the leap to calling it a Sky Father. This is putting the cart before the horses and equating Turkic Tengri and Indo-European conceptions to a generic term in Sumerian.

My own view is that Egyptian religion had strong tendencies to equate gods one to the other, like Re-Harakhty, Horus-on-the-Horison, Osiris-Apis, Atum-Re, etc. These were usually Ra based in most cases, as part of pervasive Heliopolitan influence especially in the Sixth dynasty.
To see associations between sky goddesses and cow goddesses is not foreign to Egyptian thought, far from it, but to attempt to derive a supreme god therefrom would be.
Egyptian religion had an undercurrent of Summus Dei ideas, like most religions, but it was not fixed nor likely original.

You make good arguments for association, which no one would argue with. Also Hathor was an important deity, associated with other important deities, but to leap to a conclusion of theoretical supremacy does not seem to be supported by our extant texts and is highly suppositional.

In anyway, the relation between Egyptian Religion and Israelite Religion is very tenuous. The Israelites show far more concepts in common with their Canaanite and Babylonian brethen, with Semites in general, than with the non-Semitic ancient Egyptians.
Even Sumerian ideas are not so foreign, as you pointed out, Cuneiform Sumerian acted as the classical language of the Middle East into the latter half of first Millenium BC.

 

[rakovsky]

Hello, Quid,
It sounds like you have a real familiarity with the ancient religions.

You write:

As I understand Atenism, the Aten was seen as a living being, in fact the embodiment of life. To consider a god not a person would be foreign to Egyptian thought which personified everything right down to regal power and the throne itself (Isis).

...
The Aten predates Akhenaton. We see it in his father's barque for instance. Aten was a derivitive of Heliopolitan sun worship, essentially an aspect of Ra. Heliopolitan priests had been treating Ra as supreme and perhaps the embodiment of other gods for millenia. Akhenaton's revolution was merely bringing this to its logical conclusion.

OK, I see, a god must be a person in Egyptian thought. I guess you are right, but my doubt is that since monotheistic Aten worship was a big exception unique to this period, a deviation in a sense, perhaps their understanding of the Aten personhood/personlessness was a deviation too? That is, maybe Atenism differed in this respect as well, in that they did not consider Aten a person?
It's only a doubt on my part, but I guess you are right.

You write:

• However, look at the devotion that Pure Land Buddhists show to Amitabha, who is in fact not a person but an abstract philosophical construction. Fizzywig posts repeated threads here with multiple such quotations. Impersonality is no impediment.

This is interesting. A reason I have been told why Hindus do not worship Brahman or have temples to it, the ultimate supreme reality, is that it, reality, is not a person. Knowing is not its property (like it is a human's peroperty), it is its essence (eg. knowingness as part of what exists). It is a neuter noun, not a he or they.

We have had this discussion before. I do not hold to the derivation of YHWH from El or Yahu of Ebla or any Sumerian conception nor did the Sumerians have a supreme quintessential original god idea or at least not one on record.
The archaeological record does not support this.
I hold to YHWH deriving from the Shasu of YHW in Sinai, which lines up well with the Biblical account.

My strategy was to look at God's characteristics in the Old Testament and equate them with known Egyptian gods and Set came quite high on my list. I offered the association of Set with Baal and El to show that the Egyptians and Canaanites would also see a similarity. It was further support, not derivation.

• 
  
• The earlier conceptions of God descending from Seir and being represented by storms and thick cloud perhaps point to similarity with Set (as YHWH was later associated with Baal and El in the Northern Kingdom and Baal was associated with Set, especially amongst semitic peoples in the delta). Set was seen as a bringer of plague, sterility and the desert, but was basically a storm god who can also withhold these things.

Just going by these properties alone above, it is not clear to me there is much correlation or resemblance between Set and Yahweh. They both descend from Seir (yes?) and have storms, but there are many other more essential aspects I see in Yahweh, like being a Supreme heavenly Creator. In this I find more similarity between Yahweh/ the Israelite Elohim/Adonai to the Sumerian An than to the Sumerian Enlil, even though I can understand that Yahweh could in his derivation or origin be closer to Enlil. That is, the Hebrews took these Sumerian myths and gods and made Enlil or Yah their chief deity, but in doing so they changed his story and aspects so much that it sounds to me like Yahweh more closely resembles the primeval heaven god An.

I understand your case, I just think it highly speculative.
As to Dingir, as I told you in your previous thread on this sort of topic, Dingir is not a specific god nor does it justify the leap to calling it a Sky Father. This is putting the cart before the horses and equating Turkic Tengri and Indo-European conceptions to a generic term in Sumerian.

My own view is that Egyptian religion had strong tendencies to equate gods one to the other, like Re-Harakhty, Horus-on-the-Horison, Osiris-Apis, Atum-Re, etc. These were usually Ra based in most cases, as part of pervasive Heliopolitan influence especially in the Sixth dynasty.

To see associations between sky goddesses and cow goddesses is not foreign to Egyptian thought, far from it, but to attempt to derive a supreme god therefrom would be.

They combined gods so much and made supreme gods from them like Amun-Ra, thinking that the gods were emanations of the true god, it seems not foreign to their ideas to combine NT and Ra into NTR.

Egyptian religion had an undercurrent of Summus Dei ideas,

can you please talk more about this?

You make good arguments for association, which no one would argue with. Also Hathor was an important deity, associated with other important deities, but to leap to a conclusion of theoretical supremacy does not seem to be supported by our extant texts and is highly suppositional.

Who would be more supreme in their pantheon than Hathor-Nut-Neith, the mother of the gods and of Ra?

Maybe Ra himself?
I want to look at Ra in a subsequent message.

In anyway, the relation between Egyptian Religion and Israelite Religion is very tenuous. The Israelites show far more concepts in common with their Canaanite and Babylonian brethen, with Semites in general, than with the non-Semitic ancient Egyptians.

The monotheism in Egyptian religion seems a strong connection. Numerous scholars I read think that at a certain point Amun-Ra received intense focus as THE god of Egypt. In the Torah, Moses and Aaron are culturally Egyptians who even have trouble speaking Hebrew (at least Moses), and they introduce a very monotheistic version of religion that maybe hadnt been as clear earlier.

Even Sumerian ideas are not so foreign, as you pointed out, Cuneiform Sumerian acted as the classical language of the Middle East into the latter half of first Millenium BC.

Yes.

The flood story is interesting Egyptian mythology as I just noticed yesterday the similarity to the Torah's story. I think there was a major flooding on the coasts in 56000 BC or so. That would have been maybe 2100 years before what we see as hieroglyphics first picked up in Egypt. Maybe the Great Flood story is a remembrance of that major event.

 

[rakovsky]

Let's turn now to some sources on the god Ra:

Ra

His name in hieroglyphics is:

OR:

or

Here you can see the similarity between Ra and well-known falcons:

The essay "Ra | The Sun God of Egypt" gives information portraying Ra as a supreme god:

The ancient Egyptians revered Ra as the god who created everything. Also known as the Sun God, Ra was a powerful deity and a central god of the Egyptian pantheon. The ancient Egyptians worshiped Ra more than any other god... Ra (pronounced ray) represents sunlight, warmth and growth. Ra was usually depicted in human form. He had a falcon head which is crowned with a sun disc. This sun disc was encircled by a sacred cobra named Uraeus. Ra has also been depicted as a man with the head of a beetle and also a human man with the head of a ram. ... His main symbol, however, is the sun disk.
...
Ra God Facts

• The ancient Egyptians worshiped Ra to such an extent above other gods that some historians have argued that ancient Egyptian religion was indeed a monotheistic one with Ra as the singular god.
• Historians believe that the pyramids might represent rays of sunlight, further connecting the pharaohs with Ra, the sun god.
• The morning manifestation of Ra is known as “Khepri the scarab God.”
• The evening manifestation of Ra is known as the ram-headed god, Khnum.
• The sacred cobra that encircled Ra’s crown symbolized royalty, sovereignty and divine authority.
• The right eye of Ra represented the Sun; while the left eye of Ra represented the moon.

http://www.ancient-egypt-online.com/egyptian-god-ra.html

In passing I would like to note the concept of the eye of Ra or eye of Horus, mentioned earlier. It's true that this was equated with the sun, but it's also true that the depiction used for it matches what the light-detecting pineal gland (a literal third eye) inside the brain looks like. The Egyptians divided the diagram of the eye of Horus/Ra into sections and used it for calculations:

For more information, see: http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/eye.html

In Egyptian mythology, Ra defeated the evil snake god Apep and gave birth to the dry air god and the moisture god:

At the end of the day, it was believed that Ra died (swallowed by Nut) and sailed on to the underworld, leaving the moon in his place to light up the world. Ra was reborn at dawn the very next day. During his journey across the heavens during the day, he fought with his main enemy, an evil serpent named Apep, or also, The Lord of Chaos. In some stories, Ra, in the form of a cat named Mau, defeats the evil serpent, Apep. This is part of the reason why cats are so highly-revered in Egypt.

Ra created himself from the primordial chaos. ... Humans were created from Ra’s tears.

In the Legend of Ra, Isis and the Snake, as Ra grew old, he dribbled saliva. Isis knew that Ra’s power was hidden in his secret name. Isis gathered Ra’s saliva and created a snake out of it. She set the snake in Ra’s path and it bit him. Isis wanted the power Ra had always enjoyed, but she knew she had to get him to tell her his secret name. Eventually, because of the pain he was in, Ra allowed Isis to “search through him” and in so doing, she healed him and Ra’s power was transferred over to her.
http://www.ancient-egypt-online.com/egyptian-god-ra.html

This story of Ra, Isis, the snake and the accumulation of secret powerful knowledge bears a very vague resemblance to elements in the story of the garden of Eden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And as in Eden there was a tree of life, such a tree is associated with the temple to Ra:

The Tree of Life is an important religious symbol to the Egyptians. The Tree of Life was located within Ra’s sun temple in Heliopolis and was considered sacred. The fruit that sprang from this tree was not available to humans, but only in aging-rituals reserved for pharaohs. Another important ancient Egyptian symbol connected to Ra is the “Bennu”. Bennu is the name of the bird that represented Ra’s soul. This bird is a phoenix and it was seated at the Tree of Life in Ra’s Sun Temple in Heliopolis. Inside the temple, on top of an obelisk, sat the Benben Stone. This pyramid-shaped stone served as a beacon to Bennu and is also an important ancient Egyptian religious symbol.
http://www.ancient-egypt-online.com/egyptian-god-ra.htm

I should add though that the equation of Bennu with a phoenix was made by the Greeks' interpretation of the Egyptian myth. It also mentions an interesting fact that can be found with the goddess Nut. Namely, while Nut does not have a temple, the essay proposes that Ra's solar temples did not have a statue for Ra, as instead they were open-air for Ra's light:

Solar temples were built for Ra but did not contain a statue of the god. Instead, they were created to be open to the sunlight that Ra represented. The earliest known temple built in honor of Ra exists in Heliopolis (what is now a Cairo suburb). This solar temple is known as “Benu-Phoenix” and is believed to have been erected in the exact spot where Ra emerged into creation. Although Ra dates back to the second dynasty, he is not the oldest of the Egyptian gods. It wasn’t until the fifth dynasty that Ra became closely associated with the pharaoh. As the king and leader of Egypt, the pharaoh was seen as the human manifestation of Horus, so the two gods became connected. This new deity fusion was then referred to as “Ra-Horakhty” meaning Ra is Horus of the Horizon.

http://www.ancient-egypt-online.com/egyptian-god-ra.html

I think the photo above may be from a tomb site.

Wikipedia's essay on Ra mentions a correlation between him and Horus, in that Horus means "hawk":

He was believed to rule in all parts of the created world: the sky, the earth, and the underworld. He was associated with the falcon or hawk... The cult of the Mnevis bull, an embodiment of Ra, had its center in Heliopolis and there was a formal burial ground for the sacrificed bulls north of the city. All forms of life were believed to have been created by Ra, who called each of them into existence by speaking their secret names. Alternatively man was created from Ra's tears and sweat, hence the Egyptians call themselves the "Cattle of Ra."

To the Egyptians, the sun represented light, warmth, and growth. This made the sun deity very important, as the sun was seen as the ruler of all that he created. The sun disk was either seen as the body or eye of Ra.

Ra in the underworld
Ra was thought to travel on two solar boats called the Mandjet (the Boat of Millions of Years), or morning boat, and the Mesektet, or evening/night boat. These boats took him on his journey through the sky and the Duat, the literal underworld of Egypt. While Ra was on the Mesektet, he was in his ram-headed form.[3] When Ra traveled in his sun boat, he was accompanied by various other deities including Sia (perception) and Hu (command), as well as Heka (magic power). Sometimes, members of the Ennead helped him on his journey, including Set, who overcame the serpent Apophis, and Mehen, who defended against the monsters of the underworld. ... Apophis, the god of chaos, was an enormous serpent who attempted to stop the sun boat's journey every night by consuming it or by stopping it in its tracks with a hypnotic stare. ... The night boat would carry him through the underworld and back towards the east in preparation for his rebirth. These myths of Ra represented the sun rising as the rebirth of the sun by the sky goddess Nut; thus attributing the concept of rebirth and renewal to Ra and strengthening his role as a creator god as well.

In some literature, Ra is described as an aging king with golden flesh, silver bones, and hair of lapis lazuli.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra

It also explains how belief in Ra grew during the early dynasties, especially the 5th dynasty of the mid-3rd millenium BC. The pyramids of Giza were aligned to Ra's center in Heliopolis, known as "Iunu, the "Place of Pillars", later known to the Greeks as Heliopolis (lit. "Sun City")":

By the Fourth Dynasty, pharaohs were seen as Ra's manifestations on earth, referred to as "Sons of Ra". His worship increased massively in the Fifth Dynasty, when Ra became a state deity and pharaohs had specially aligned pyramids, obelisks, and solar temples built in his honor. The rulers of the Fifth Dynasty told their followers that they were sons of Ra himself and the wife of the high priest of Heliopolis.

Gods merged with Ra
Amun and Amun-Ra
Amun was a member of the Ogdoad, representing creation energies with Amaunet, a very early patron of Thebes. He was believed to create via breath, and thus was identified with the wind rather than the sun. As the cults of Amun and Ra became increasingly popular in Upper and Lower Egypt respectively they were combined to create Amun-Ra, a solar creator god. It is hard to distinguish exactly when this combination happened, but references to Amun-Ra appeared in pyramid texts as early as the fifth dynasty. The most common belief is that Amun-Ra was invented as a new state deity by the Theban rulers of the New Kingdom to unite worshipers of Amun with the older cult of Ra around the 18th dynasty.[8] Amun-Ra was given the official title "king of the gods" by worshippers, and images show the combined deity as a red-eyed man with a lion's head that had a surrounding solar disk.

Atum and Atum-Ra
Atum-Ra (or Ra-Atum) was another composite deity formed from two completely separate deities, however Ra shared more similarities with Atum than with Amun. Atum was more closely linked with the sun, and was also a creator god of the Ennead. Both Ra and Atum were regarded as the father of the deities and pharaohs, and were widely worshiped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra

The Ancient Egypt Online website connects Ra to the benben stones and obelisks:

According to the Pyramid Texts, Ra (as Atum) emerged from the waters of Nun as a benben stone (an obelisk-like pillar). He then spat forth Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture), and Tefnut in turn gave birth to Geb (earth) and Nut (sky).
http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/ra.html

This may help explain why his cult center at Heliopolis was named Place of Pillars in Egyptian.

The Egyptian Mythology website gives a theory about the relationship between the myths and the Egyptians' understanding of reality:

Throughout this daily round, Ra’s boat was attacked by the great serpent Apophis and other forces of chaos who wanted to destroy the sun and the cosmos it upheld. The extremely wise and powerful Ra always knew what to do to fend off these incursions, and had the might to do so.
...
It’s important to bear in mind that these were not propositions about the physical aspect of reality; they were symbols that referred to the intangible, spiritual aspects of the sun rather than literal statements about its tangible aspects. Ra’s daily course was a cycle of death and rebirth. When he fell below the western horizon in the evening, he died and entered the realm of the dead. But every dawn, he was born anew and waxed in majesty and brilliance, enabling all life on earth to flourish along with him. Ra thus possessed an inexhaustible abundance of vitality, which he bestowed upon those who acted in accordance with his principles and decrees as king (see below). This applied equally to the gods in the sky, humans, animals, and plants on earth, and the dead in the underworld, who, if they had lived righteous lives, had the privilege of joining him in the sky by day.

Due to this overflowing plenitude, without which life would be impossible, the Egyptian sun god was also thought of as being the creator of the cosmos. Which particular sun god was credited with this act varied across the several different creation narratives from ancient Egypt. In many of them, Ra was explicitly named as the creator, and even when he wasn’t, the actions of the creator god were generally identical in essence to those performed by Ra in the creation stories that named him as the self-created instigator of the process.

http://egyptianmythology.org/gods-and-goddesses/ra

The essay also explains a theory or a myth that Ra was self-created. Since elsewhere we know that Ra had a cycle of rebirth, maybe it means that he was initially self-created?

Ra was self-created, and had created everything else as well, either directly or indirectly. The other gods were descendents of, or extensions of, Ra. According to one popular liturgical formula, Ra (and the sun god more generally) was “the one, from whom came millions.” Ra’s power was therefore far greater than that of any of the other gods, and it was inevitable that someone so able in every way would have become their king. His right to this position was sealed by the fact that, since the ancient Egyptians thought that the “natural” order and the political order were two inextricably intertwined aspects of a single, overarching cosmic order

This latter idea is analogous to the view in ancient Chinese mythology that the natural order under an emperor matched the idea of a celestial emperor.

It also explains a myth that Horus was descended from Ra:

Even after Ra’s own kingship ended (still in the mythical “time before time”), he remained the head of the divine council, and the rulership was passed to his son Shu, then to Shu’s son Geb, then to Geb’s son Osiris, and finally to Osiris’s son Horus.

Combinations with Other Gods

Today, we tend to think of identity as being a more or less fixed and centralized thing (“individuality”). But this wasn’t the case with the ancient Egyptians. For them, the self was highly fluid and diffuse. This applied to the deities every bit as much as to humans. ... We’ve already noted that Amun became Amun-Ra as his prestige grew over the centuries.

http://egyptianmythology.org/gods-and-goddesses/ra/

How would you explain the underlined part above?

Finally, the website makes a very interesting comment that effectively suggests a strong link conceptually among Egyptians between God the Father and Ra:

Ra’s worship is very well-attested throughout the entirety of that civilization, from its beginning to its end. It can also be readily seen across all social classes; while Ra was a central deity in the monarchical aspect of religion, he was also an exceedingly prominent deity in popular devotion, as a great number of amulets and spells bearing his name demonstrate. In fact, Ra continued to be worshiped after Egypt was formally converted to Christianity in the fifth century AD. Written prayers from this period sometimes invoked Ra alongside Jesus and the Holy Spirit, evidently identifying Ra as the third member of the Trinity – the Father.

The Crystal Links website also mentions Budge's view that Ra was the one supreme ultimate God in Egypt:

After the deities were paired with pharaohs, the children of Hathor were considered to be fathered by Ra. Although not the contemporary view, E. A. Wallis Budge (1857-1934) claims that Ra was the one god of Egyptian monotheism, of which all other deities were aspects, manifestations, phases, or forms.
...Th[ere] was an early theme in Egyptian myths [of] different names assigned to the sun depending upon its position in the sky. At sunrise he was the young boy Khepri, at noon the falcon-headed man Harakhty, and at sunset the elder Atum.
...
The uraeus was the instrument with which Isis gained the throne of Egypt for her husband Osiris. As the sun, Ra was thought to see everything.

In the Pyramid Text, Re is perpetually resurrected in the mornings in the form of a scarab beetle, Khepri, which means the Emerging One. He rides on the primordial waters, called Nun, in his sacred bark (boat) along with a number of other deities across the sky, where at sunset he becomes Atum, the "All Lord".

http://www.crystalinks.com/ra.html

One curious thing for me is the meaning of Ra in its terminology. I understand that it means the sun, but wonder if it has other connotations?
Archibald Sayce writes: "The commonest etymology is that deriving the name from a verb Ra to give, to make, to be a person or a thing, so that Ra would thus be the great organizer, the author of all things.... As a matter of fact, the word is simply the name of the [sun] applied to the god." (History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia and Assyria, P. 117)

Michael Desfayes proposes that the god's name of Ra is etymologically related to the Phoenician anti-plague deity Resheph, because he sees an etymology in it that means "shining":

• Rešeph (Phoenician). A god. From a base r-g shining :
  
  
• Assyrian ra-ag shining; ràjè; to shine; ravi; sun
• Egyptian re-e, ra sun
• Phoenician Rešeph a god
• Caucasus ragh sun; rigu, reü, ray sun
• Berber erēg to blaze ; reg; to burn

http://www.michel-desfayes.org/godsandgoddesses.html

Resheph was an anti-plague god of the Phoenicians, but a few times in the Bible this word brings to mind these same root words of shining, the sun, and burning, and a reminder of Ra in flight:

The name Resheph appears as a word in Classical Hebrew with the meaning "flame, lightning" (Psalm 78:48) and "a burning fever, a plague" by which the body is "inflamed", Deuteronomy 32:24 but could be understood as archaic language in some instances as a proper name such as in Hab. 3:5 and Job 5:7 in the phrase "sons of Resheph soar in flight".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resheph

Speaking of ancient Hebrew, there is one place in the Bible where God is called a sun (Ps. 84:11), but this can be a metaphor.

The online etymological dictionary connects Ra not only to the sun, but to "day":
"Ra: hawk-headed sovereign sun god of Egyptian mythology," from Egyptian R' "sun, day.""
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ra; © 2010 Douglas Harper

The essay The meaning of Ra explains another network of relationships with this word:

[It w]as brought to my attention that the chinese word (Ri) 日, which takes the same Egyptian hieroglyphic shape of a circle and a dot inside, means "sun" in Chinese too. This picto - audio congruence between Egyptian(Ra) and chinese(Ri) pushed me to further research on the possible transfer of the use of this monosyllabic word - into other languages - with close meanings. In the Filipino language, we can find that the word (Aarau) means "the sun" too.
Also, the English word (Ray), which means "a beam of light", is derived from the Latin (Rayon), very close to the meaning of "the sun". So we can decide that the word ''ray'' is derived from ''Ra'' and then , all the Latin prefixes such as radio, radia, etc... are derived from latin: Rayon from Egyptian Ra (my theory);

http://hubpages.com/education/the-meaning-of-Ra

First of all, the reference above is a bit circumspect. The modern Chinese symbol for a sun does look like two rectangles, but the author is right that the ancient Chinese and Egyptian symbols were at times the same for the sun. On the Chinese Oracle bones we find the same sign:

Second, in these references, if they are correct, I see another connection to the Sumerian Dingir, Turkic Tengri, and IndoEuropean Dyeus. I have read scholars claiming that these words all refer to concepts of shining or brightness as well as the heavens. From this word Deus, it is theorized by scholars, comes the words Deity and Day in English, Dios and Dia in Spanish, etc. If Ra means shining and day along with sun, this can be another connection. Plus, the sign of Dingir is commonly considered a star, and we see that Ra means the sun, which is also the main star for earth. So day, shining, and sun are concepts that can etymologically be traced to God in those other languages.

A big difference though is that Dingir and Tengri are also thought to refer to the sky and heavens. That is where the sky goddesses Nut and Neith come in with their references to the heavens. Perhaps they are what completes the analogy when the two goddesses are combined with Ra to make NTR?

Third of all, speaking of international ancient connections, it's quite interesting that the symbol used for the stars inside the goddess Nut are the same symbol for the Chinese word Da 大 (Great), from which the symbols for "Tai Chi", the ancient (3rd c. BC) philosophy of "Taiji" 太极 ("Supreme Ultimate", from which Yin and Yang are derived) and "Tian" (Heaven/The Supreme God) 天 are derived.

An example of the hieroglyphics with Nut and the Stars.

Another website I found proposes that the Chinese Tian ("God"/"Heaven") is a combination of Ti and An, the latter being the name of the Supreme Sumerian god. It claims there is an eight-legged Oracle Chinese Bone, which would bring to mind the eight legged asterisk of the Sumerian sign for An:
http://www.guiculture.com/fs08biblefs2.htm

A counterargument to associating Yahweh with Ra might be found in the discussion on the plagues of Egypt. One rabbinical scholar thinks that some of them were meant as a rejection of Ra because the last three plagues blotted out the sun or killed the eldest children at midnight when the sun was on the opposite side of the earth.
See: "YHWH's War against the Egyptian Sun God Ra"
http://thetorah.com/yhwhs-war-against-the-egyptian-sun-god-ra

 

[rakovsky]

Considering the early status of Horus and his relationship to Hathor, let's consider this deity as well.

Horus
Horus means literally falcon, and the hieroglyphic for Horus is a falcon next to a god sign:

Wikipedia explains the original form of the name: "Horus is recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs as ḥr.w; the pronunciation has been reconstructed as *Ḥāru, meaning "falcon"... Additional meanings are thought to have been "the distant one" or 'one who is above, over'" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horus)

Horus from the Temple of Horus, Edfu

From the images of Horus, particularly where he is portrayed as a man with a falcon's head, we can see a close conceptual resemblance to Ra.

Horus is the Egyptian falcon god, lord of the sky, and symbol of divine kingship. Horus was represented either as a falcon-headed man or as a falcon. The sky was represented by the wings of Horus and his two eyes symbolized the sun and the moon, with the right eye being the sun and the left, the moon. ... The falcon was sacred to Horus from the earliest times and the image of a falcon on its perch became the hieroglyph symbol representing the word God. In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh was seen as a manifestation of the living Horus on the throne of Egypt.​

http://www.emuseumstore.com/Horus-Egyptian-God-of-War-Wall-Relief-Stone_p_3280.html

About the phrases Eye of Ra and Eye of Horus mentioned above, I found:

​

From very early times in Egypt the sun and the moon were regarded as the eyes of the great falcon god Horus, though the two eyes eventually became differentiated, with the left eye (the "Eye of Horus") often being regarded as the symbol of the moon and the right eye (the "Eye of Re") being that of the sun.

Re was said to be the "father of the gods," for he was their head and king, as well as the father of humanity, and, according to some ancient myths, all living creatures that were believed to grow from his sweat or tears. The tears were produced from the Eye of Re, which was separable from him with a mind of its own. Once when it did not return, Re sent Shu and Tefnut to get it, the Eye stubbornly resisted, and in the struggle shed tears; from the tears, men grew. Perhaps this myth emerged because the Egyptian words for "tears" and "men" share a similar sound.

Read more: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/eyeofhorusandre.htm#ixzz4G2D7EsZL

The story of men being created from tears and Ra's eye is interesting, as I would ask if it implies that the "eye of ra" or its sign has some kind of special spiritual purpose? It is interesting for me to see the importance of the third eye in Hinduism, and to see the resemblance with the pineal gland in the brain:

Another essay explains that Horus was seen either as the son of Ra or as the son of Osiris and Isis:

Pharaohs were the followers of Re and so Horus became associated with the sun as well. To the people this solar deity became identified as the son of Osiris. Attempts to resolve the conflicts between these different gods in different parts of Egypt resulted in at least fifteen distinct forms of Horus. They can be divided fairly easily into two groups, solar and Osirian, based on the parentage of the particular form of Horus. If he is said to be the son of Isis, he is Osirian; otherwise he is a solar deity. The solar Horus was called the son of Atum, or Re, or Geb and Nut variously.

As Harsiesis, he is "Horus, the son of Isis". Horus was conceived magically by Isis following the murder of his father, Osiris. Horus was raised by his mother on the floating island of Chemmis near Buto. He was in constant danger from his evil uncle Seth but his mother protected him and he survived.

As a child, Horus was known as Harpokrates, "the infant Horus", and was portrayed as a baby being suckled by Isis.

Haroeris, "Horus the Elder", was one of the earliest forms of Horus and the patron deity of Upper (southern) Egypt. He was said to be the son, or sometimes the husband of Hathor. He was also the brother of Osiris and Seth. He became the conqueror of Seth (the patron of Lower Egypt) c. 3000 BCE when Upper Egypt conquered Lower Egypt and formed the united kingdom of Egypt. He was depicted as a falcon-headed man, sometimes wearing the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Horus (the elder) had numerous wives and children, and his 'four sons' were grouped together and generally said to be born of Isis. The four were known as: Duamutef, Imsety, Hapi and Qebehsenuef. They were born from a lotus flower and were solar gods associated with the creation. They were retrieved from the waters of Nun by Sobek on the orders of Re. http://www.egyptianmyths.net/horus.htm

Since Hathor means Horus' mansion, I can see that in the early mythology stages, Hathor would be either Horus' mother or wife.

Wikipedia talks about the development of the myth of Horus, noting that in the early times Horus wasn't Osiris' and Isis' child but their sibling:

In early Egypt, Horus was the brother of Isis, Osiris, Set and Nephthys. As different cults formed, he became the son of Isis and Osiris. Isis remained the sister of Osiris, Set and Nephthys.
Pyramid texts ca. 2400–2300 BC[5] describe the nature of the Pharaoh in different characters as both Horus and Osiris. The Pharaoh as Horus in life became the Pharaoh as Osiris in death, where he was united with the rest of the gods.
...
Horus was also said to be a god of war and hunting. The Horus falcon is shown upon a standard on the predynastic Hunters Palette in the "lion hunt".
...

The earliest recorded form of Horus is the patron deity of Nekhen in Upper Egypt, who is the first known national god, specifically related to the king who in time came to be regarded as a manifestation of Horus in life and Osiris in death.[1] The most commonly encountered family relationship describes Horus as the son of Isis and Osiris, and he plays a key role in the Osiris myth as Osiris's heir and the rival to Set, the murderer of Osiris. In another tradition Hathor is regarded as his mother and sometimes as his wife.
...
The gods produced by Atum were all representative of cosmic and terrestrial forces in Egyptian life. By identifying Horus as the offspring of these forces, then identifying him with Atum himself, and finally identifying the Pharaoh with Horus, the Pharaoh theologically had dominion over all the world.

The notion of Horus as the Pharaoh seems to have been superseded by the concept of the Pharaoh as the son of Ra during the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt.

Her-ur (Horus the Elder)
In this form he represented the god of light and the husband of Hathor. He was one of the oldest gods of ancient Egypt. He became the patron of Nekhen (Hierakonpolis) and the first national god (God of the Kingdom).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horus

Another essay proposes that worship of Horus was an outgrowth of Egyptian worship or respect for falcons or it began in thinking of him as a ruler of the sky:

From the very earliest of times, the falcon seems to have been worshipped in Egypt as representative of the greatest cosmic powers. ...
Horus is one of ancient Egypt's best known gods, as well as one of its oldest. His name is attested to from at least the beginning of the Dynastic Period, and depictions of falcon deities on earlier artifacts, such as the Narmer Palette, probably represent this same god. The Turin Canon, which provides some of our most important information on Egypt's early history, specifically describes the Predynastic rulers of Egypt as "Followers of Horus".

The use of his name was also widespread in personal names throughout Egyptian history,... The original form of Horus was probably that of a sky god, known as "lord of the sky". The Egyptian word " her" (hor, har), from which the god's name is derived means "the one on high", or "the distant one", probably in reference to the soaring flight of the hunting falcon, if not a reference to the solar aspect of the god....

Read more: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/horus.htm#ixzz4G2QucWqF

It then theorizes that Horus went from being a general sky god to a dun god in particular, as he turns out to be in the early literature about him, connecting him with the rising sun:

A natural outgrowth of his role as "lord of the sky" was his aspect as a sun god. An ivory comb of the 1st Dynasty king Den depicts a falcon in a boat riding on outstretched wings, suggesting the falcon traversing the sky as the sun god. The early Pyramid Texts specifically refer to him in solar terms as "god of the east", and he appears in at least three forms in this guise.
As Horakhty (Harakhty), or "Horus of the two horizons", Horus was the god of the rising and setting sun, but more particularly the god of the east and the sunrise. In the Pyramid Texts, the deceased king is said to be reborn in the eastern sky as Horakhty. Eventually, Horakhty became a part of the Heliopolis sun cult and was fused with its solar god as Re-Horakhty. As Behdety, or "he of [the] behdet", Horus was the hawk-winged sun disk which seems to incorporate the idea of the passage of the sun through the sky. As Hor-em-akhet (Harmachis) or "Horus in the horizon", Horus was visualized as a sun god in falcon or leonine form.

Read more: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/horus.htm#ixzz4G2RsMJmZ

In my own view, there may not have been such a crucial separation and distinction in stages from falcon>sky god>sun god. That is, perhaps even in prehistoric times they associated these ideas, that is, the falcon (Horus) with the sun (Ra), as a being flying through the sky. I understood the concept of the pharaoh as a mediator to heaven, but not quite how the Sphinx is a Horus of the Horizon:

From the earliest Dynastic Period, the king's name was written in the rectangular device known as the serekh, which depicted a falcon perched on a stylized palace facade and which seems to indicate the king as mediator between the heavenly and earthly realms, if not the god manifest within the palace as the king himself. This was the "Horus name" of the king, who took other names in time, including a "Golden Horus" name in which a divine falcon is depicted upon the hieroglyphic sign for gold.

...Horus the successor was also referred to as Iunmutef (Pillar of His Mother), which was used as a funerary priestly title. By the New Kingdom, the Great Sphinx of Giza, originally a representation of the 4th Dynasty King Khafre (or possibly Khufu), was interpreted by the Egyptians as an image of Hor-em-akhet (Harmakhis), or "Horus in the Horizon".
...
it is in the combined zoo-anthropomorphic form of a falcon-headed man that the god most frequently appears, often wearing the Double Crown signifying his kingship over all Egypt. In various forms, Horus often wore the Double Crown, as befitting his status as king of Egypt, the Atef, the triple atef and a disk with two plumes was also used. One of the most famous kingship imagery related to Horus is found in the statue of Khafre, seated with the Horus falcon at the back of his head with the wings of the bird protectively wrapped around the king's neck.
Read more: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/horus.htm#ixzz4G2VoMI7y

It talks about the sites where Horus was especially worshiped at various temples, noting:

Cult Worship
Clearly, he was associated with the area of Nekhen in southern Egypt (Greek Hierakonpolis or "City of the Hawk") from very early times. he was probably the falcon deity worshipped there since pre-dynastic times. ... However, Horus was worshipped along with other deities at countless Egyptian temples and the important sites of his worship are known from one end of Egypt to the other, dating to the earliest of times to the latest periods of pre-Christian Egypt. In fact, he continued to be venerated in some Old Coptic (Christian), ritual-power or magical texts. In northern Egypt, the Horus god was particularly venerated in the Delta at the ancient site of Khem (Greek Letopolis, modern Ausim) since at least the beginning of the Old Kingdom.

In the south, Horus enjoyed the attention, together with his consort Hathor, and their son Harsomptus, in the important Ptolemaic temples at Edfu and also at Kom Ombo. At Edfu, the god's many ceremonies included the annual Coronation of the Sacred Falcon at the beginning of the 5th month of the Egyptian year in which an actual falcon was selected to represent the god as king of all Egypt, thus uniting the ancient falcon god with his form as Horus son of Osiris and with the king. Even outside of ancient Egypt proper, south in Nubia, we find temples dedicated to various forms of Horus

Read more: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/horus.htm#ixzz4G2VoMI7y

Above, when it talks about Coptic ritual texts, perhaps it means Coptic texts that were not official in Christianity, kind of like writings about alchemy or magic in Christian Europe in medieval times?

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Just going by these properties alone above, it is not clear to me there is much correlation or resemblance between Set and Yahweh. They both descend from Seir (yes?) and have storms, but there are many other more essential aspects I see in Yahweh, like being a Supreme heavenly Creator. In this I find more similarity between Yahweh/ the Israelite Elohim/Adonai to the Sumerian An than to the Sumerian Enlil, even though I can understand that Yahweh could in his derivation or origin be closer to Enlil. That is, the Hebrews took these Sumerian myths and gods and made Enlil or Yah their chief deity, but in doing so they changed his story and aspects so much that it sounds to me like Yahweh more closely resembles the primeval heaven god An.

Set doesn't descend from Seir, but was a god of the lonely desert mountains, which is similar to Seir.
Set and YHWH are similar in early forms of Israelite religion, I would think, not the more developed Monotheistic form of the Prophets, I agree.

As I said before, I do not believe YHWH has any derivation from Sumerian sources. I find the arguments therefore very suppositional and unlikely. A West Semitic derivation from El du yahwi Sabuoth makes more sense, but this fails on account of Egyptian references to the Shasu of YHW, so I disagree with this as well.
A non-derived imported Sinaitic God from Midian makes far more sense and fits the Bible better to boot in my mind.

They combined gods so much and made supreme gods from them like Amun-Ra, thinking that the gods were emanations of the true god, it seems not foreign to their ideas to combine NT and Ra into NTR.

To say they thought 'the gods emanations of the true god' is to put words in their mouth. There is little evidence for such thinking beyond Heliopolitan circles.
I agree a combination of Ra to create NTR is possible, but NTR is such an ancient concept predating the rise of Ra in the 6th dynasty, that I find this unlikely. We simply don't really know what NTR means in the first place, so to treat it as a god name or stand in for a theoretical god-construction is very conjectural.

can you please talk more about this?

Mostly related to Heliopolitan priests elevating Ra to supreme god, equating all others to him. This was an ongoing process throughout Egyptian history and built to a crescendo of Ra-based combinations and derivations just before Akhenaton. The Aten itself was a derivitive of Ra, however Akhenaton built a new religion on this solid base of tradition and tried to supplant all others. His Father Amenophis III had built temples to the Aten as embodiment of all the gods without difficulty before his revolution tried to bring it to the logical conclusion of absolute monotheism.
This failed however, and such ideas were firmly in the background thereafter. Syncreticism of gods however continued, most norably how Ra was frankly absorbed in late and Hellenistic Egypt into Osiris, till Ra as a separate god completely disapeared and only Osiris, spelt slightly differently to incorporate a Re in the last syllable, remained.
Egypt was ripe for Monotheism, which is why Christianity spread so rapidly there. It is estimated that Egypt was mostly Christian by the beginning of the Fourth century, even before Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire.

Who would be more supreme in their pantheon than Hathor-Nut-Neith, the mother of the gods and of Ra?

Maybe Ra himself?
I want to look at Ra in a subsequent message.


The monotheism in Egyptian religion seems a strong connection. Numerous scholars I read think that at a certain point Amun-Ra received intense focus as THE god of Egypt. In the Torah, Moses and Aaron are culturally Egyptians who even have trouble speaking Hebrew (at least Moses), and they introduce a very monotheistic version of religion that maybe hadnt been as clear earlier.

Hathot/Nut/Neith is a theoretical entity of your own construction. While not outside of the realm of possibility, I would wager it is completely impossible to prove such an entity existed. If you would seek a supreme deity in Egypt, I would look to Ra or some form of him.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Let's turn now to some sources on the god Ra:

Ra

His name in hieroglyphics is:

OR:

or

Here you can see the similarity between Ra and well-known falcons:

The essay "Ra | The Sun God of Egypt" gives information portraying Ra as a supreme god:



In passing I would like to note the concept of the eye of Ra or eye of Horus, mentioned earlier. It's true that this was equated with the sun, but it's also true that the depiction used for it matches what the light-detecting pineal gland (a literal third eye) inside the brain looks like. The Egyptians divided the diagram of the eye of Horus/Ra into sections and used it for calculations:

For more information, see: http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/eye.html

In Egyptian mythology, Ra defeated the evil snake god Apep and gave birth to the dry air god and the moisture god:

This story of Ra, Isis, the snake and the accumulation of secret powerful knowledge bears a very vague resemblance to elements in the story of the garden of Eden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And as in Eden there was a tree of life, such a tree is associated with the temple to Ra:


I should add though that the equation of Bennu with a phoenix was made by the Greeks' interpretation of the Egyptian myth. It also mentions an interesting fact that can be found with the goddess Nut. Namely, while Nut does not have a temple, the essay proposes that Ra's solar temples did not have a statue for Ra, as instead they were open-air for Ra's light:

I think the photo above may be from a tomb site.

Wikipedia's essay on Ra mentions a correlation between him and Horus, in that Horus means "hawk":


It also explains how belief in Ra grew during the early dynasties, especially the 5th dynasty of the mid-3rd millenium BC. The pyramids of Giza were aligned to Ra's center in Heliopolis, known as "Iunu, the "Place of Pillars", later known to the Greeks as Heliopolis (lit. "Sun City")":


The Ancient Egypt Online website connects Ra to the benben stones and obelisks:

This may help explain why his cult center at Heliopolis was named Place of Pillars in Egyptian.

The Egyptian Mythology website gives a theory about the relationship between the myths and the Egyptians' understanding of reality:

http://egyptianmythology.org/gods-and-goddesses/ra

The essay also explains a theory or a myth that Ra was self-created. Since elsewhere we know that Ra had a cycle of rebirth, maybe it means that he was initially self-created?

This latter idea is analogous to the view in ancient Chinese mythology that the natural order under an emperor matched the idea of a celestial emperor.

It also explains a myth that Horus was descended from Ra:

How would you explain the underlined part above?

Finally, the website makes a very interesting comment that effectively suggests a strong link conceptually among Egyptians between God the Father and Ra:


The Crystal Links website also mentions Budge's view that Ra was the one supreme ultimate God in Egypt:



One curious thing for me is the meaning of Ra in its terminology. I understand that it means the sun, but wonder if it has other connotations?
Archibald Sayce writes: "The commonest etymology is that deriving the name from a verb Ra to give, to make, to be a person or a thing, so that Ra would thus be the great organizer, the author of all things.... As a matter of fact, the word is simply the name of the [sun] applied to the god." (History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia and Assyria, P. 117)

Michael Desfayes proposes that the god's name of Ra is etymologically related to the Phoenician anti-plague deity Resheph, because he sees an etymology in it that means "shining":

• Rešeph (Phoenician). A god. From a base r-g shining :
  
  
• Assyrian ra-ag shining; ràjè; to shine; ravi; sun
• Egyptian re-e, ra sun
• Phoenician Rešeph a god
• Caucasus ragh sun; rigu, reü, ray sun
• Berber erēg to blaze ; reg; to burn

http://www.michel-desfayes.org/godsandgoddesses.html

Resheph was an anti-plague god of the Phoenicians, but a few times in the Bible this word brings to mind these same root words of shining, the sun, and burning, and a reminder of Ra in flight:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resheph

Speaking of ancient Hebrew, there is one place in the Bible where God is called a sun (Ps. 84:11), but this can be a metaphor.

The online etymological dictionary connects Ra not only to the sun, but to "day":
"Ra: hawk-headed sovereign sun god of Egyptian mythology," from Egyptian R' "sun, day.""
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ra; © 2010 Douglas Harper

The essay The meaning of Ra explains another network of relationships with this word:

First of all, the reference above is a bit circumspect. The modern Chinese symbol for a sun does look like two rectangles, but the author is right that the ancient Chinese and Egyptian symbols were at times the same for the sun. On the Chinese Oracle bones we find the same sign:

Second, in these references, if they are correct, I see another connection to the Sumerian Dingir, Turkic Tengri, and IndoEuropean Dyeus. I have read scholars claiming that these words all refer to concepts of shining or brightness as well as the heavens. From this word Deus, it is theorized by scholars, comes the words Deity and Day in English, Dios and Dia in Spanish, etc. If Ra means shining and day along with sun, this can be another connection. Plus, the sign of Dingir is commonly considered a star, and we see that Ra means the sun, which is also the main star for earth. So day, shining, and sun are concepts that can etymologically be traced to God in those other languages.

A big difference though is that Dingir and Tengri are also thought to refer to the sky and heavens. That is where the sky goddesses Nut and Neith come in with their references to the heavens. Perhaps they are what completes the analogy when the two goddesses are combined with Ra to make NTR?

Third of all, speaking of international ancient connections, it's quite interesting that the symbol used for the stars inside the goddess Nut are the same symbol for the Chinese word Da 大 (Great), from which the symbols for "Tai Chi", the ancient (3rd c. BC) philosophy of "Taiji" 太极 ("Supreme Ultimate", from which Yin and Yang are derived) and "Tian" (Heaven/The Supreme God) 天 are derived.

An example of the hieroglyphics with Nut and the Stars.

Another website I found proposes that the Chinese Tian ("God"/"Heaven") is a combination of Ti and An, the latter being the name of the Supreme Sumerian god. It claims there is an eight-legged Oracle Chinese Bone, which would bring to mind the eight legged asterisk of the Sumerian sign for An:
http://www.guiculture.com/fs08biblefs2.htm

A counterargument to associating Yahweh with Ra might be found in the discussion on the plagues of Egypt. One rabbinical scholar thinks that some of them were meant as a rejection of Ra because the last three plagues blotted out the sun or killed the eldest children at midnight when the sun was on the opposite side of the earth.
See: "YHWH's War against the Egyptian Sun God Ra"
http://thetorah.com/yhwhs-war-against-the-egyptian-sun-god-ra

A lot of good information here. I would just urge caution as Ancient Egyptian is not a Semitic language but belongs to the broader Afro-Asiatic (the old Hamito-Semtic) language group, so etymologies between such distantly related languages are suspect, not even to mention Chinese.

The addition of Chinese into our whole Sumerian, Turkic, Semitic stew makes the argument even more difficult to support. I don't know much about early China so I can't say much on this though.
I would say though that Sumerian is a language isolate, so no association with any other language, luving or dead, has ever been proven beyond a few loan words adopted from it. This should be kept in mind when reading such far flung theories of associations between groups and perhaps suggests taking them with a pinch of salt.

 

[rakovsky]

A West Semitic derivation from El du yahwi Sabuoth makes more sense, but this fails on account of Egyptian references to the Shasu of YHW, so I disagree with this as well.
A non-derived imported Sinaitic God from Midian makes far more sense and fits the Bible better to boot in my mind.

These options don't sound mutually exclusive to me. I could imagine Semitic tribes worshiping the same deity across regions.

To say they thought 'the gods emanations of the true god' is to put words in their mouth. There is little evidence for such thinking beyond Heliopolitan circles.

I would need to research it more but some scholars propose that theory. Egypt and the Indus were different societies, but Hinduism is an example of a major religion from the era that thought this way.

I agree a combination of Ra to create NTR is possible, but NTR is such an ancient concept predating the rise of Ra in the 6th dynasty, that I find this unlikely.

They found him in scripts from the 2nd dynasty, and anyway Ra means "sun", so I guess that the term at least is prehistoric. And based on the way they anthropomorphized things, like the earth and air and sky, I can expect they did that with the sun in prehistory.

We simply don't really know what NTR means in the first place, so to treat it as a god name or stand in for a theoretical god-construction is very conjectural.

I researched it alot and didn't come up with any better theory, Quid. The main alternative I found was not reliably etymologically based - some scholars think that it refers to elements, natures, principles. eg. NTR vs. Natura (Latin).
But Natura comes from a different word in Latin, Natalis, birth, as in Natal Canal.
And NTR hasnt been used to clearly mean anything but the gods (ie. not elements like Air and Water apart from their gods), pharaohs (sons/emanations of god like Ra or Horus), deceased - who go to heaven (Nut).

Mostly related to Heliopolitan priests elevating Ra to supreme god, equating all others to him. This was an ongoing process throughout Egyptian history and built to a crescendo of Ra-based combinations and derivations just before Akhenaton. The Aten itself was a derivitive of Ra,...
Egypt was ripe for Monotheism, which is why Christianity spread so rapidly there. It is estimated that Egypt was mostly Christian by the beginning of the Fourth century, even before Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire.

You sir are a scholar.

Hathot/Nut/Neith is a theoretical entity of your own construction. While not outside of the realm of possibility, I would wager it is completely impossible to prove such an entity existed.

They were all identified as the same sky cow goddess, Great Flood.

 

[rakovsky]

A lot of good information here. I would just urge caution as Ancient Egyptian is not a Semitic language but belongs to the broader Afro-Asiatic (the old Hamito-Semtic) language group, so etymologies between such distantly related languages are suspect, not even to mention Chinese.

The addition of Chinese into our whole Sumerian, Turkic, Semitic stew makes the argument even more difficult to support. I don't know much about early China so I can't say much on this though.
I would say though that Sumerian is a language isolate, so no association with any other language, luving or dead, has ever been proven beyond a few loan words adopted from it. This should be kept in mind when reading such far flung theories of associations between groups and perhaps suggests taking them with a pinch of salt.

I understand what you mean. If Spanish use the word for bread as "pan", we can't reliably propose that it will sound anything like that in Chinese. They are quite different language groups.

However, when we find some very fundamental human concept that dates back to prehistoric times and then find a similarity across major language families in both concepts and some resemblance of words, we can think that there is probably a direct connection.

Take for example the words Momma and Papa. In Chinese we find "Mama" and "Baba". In Burmese there are May May and Phay Phay. In Hindi, Mother is Mata. In Coptic (late Egyptian), mother is "Mau", although I don't know what it is in Egyptian. So we can propose that there is probably a connection going back to ancient times, because Mother and Father as so essential to people and in their memories of their parents that they pass these phrases down.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I would need to research it more but some scholars propose that theory. Egypt and the Indus were different societies, but Hinduism is an example of a major religion from the era that thought this way.

Later Hinduism of the Upanishads thought this way. It would be anachronistic to think Vedic Hinduism did.

I researched it alot and didn't come up with any better theory, Quid. The main alternative I found was not reliably etymologically based - some scholars think that it refers to elements, natures, principles. eg. NTR vs. Natura (Latin).
But Natura comes from a different word in Latin, Natalis, birth, as in Natal Canal.
And NTR hasnt been used to clearly mean anything but the gods (ie. not elements like Air and Water apart from their gods), pharaohs (sons/emanations of god like Ra or Horus), deceased - who go to heaven (Nut).

I remember that theory from your previous thread.
The problem is that we actually don't know the etymology or even really the meaning of NTR. Anything we propose is conjectural. NTR has been used for various ideas like pharoahs, priests, vestments etc. so while associated with what is set apart (roughly holy) it is really not clear cut what it basically means, at least to my knowledge.

They were all identified as the same sky cow goddess, Great Flood.

They may all have been associated with the goddess, but that doesn't mean that all of them were associated one with the other.
For instance, Ra was associated with Horus, Atum, Amun, Osiris etc. yet these weren't considered one god, except perhaps as Ra by some.

I understand what you mean. If Spanish use the word for bread as "pan", we can't reliably propose that it will sound anything like that in Chinese. They are quite different language groups.

However, when we find some very fundamental human concept that dates back to prehistoric times and then find a similarity across major language families in both concepts and some resemblance of words, we can think that there is probably a direct connection.

Take for example the words Momma and Papa. In Chinese we find "Mama" and "Baba". In Burmese there are May May and Phay Phay. In Hindi, Mother is Mata. In Coptic (late Egyptian), mother is "Mau", although I don't know what it is in Egyptian. So we can propose that there is probably a connection going back to ancient times, because Mother and Father as so essential to people and in their memories of their parents that they pass these phrases down.

This is an interesting facet of language.
The easiest syllables for babies to form are ba, da, pa and as a consequence there is a simple form in almost all human languages for the babies' parents made up of them, the first words babies inevitably say. This is like pa in Afrikaans or pai in Malay or dada/dad in English or papa in Latin.
It is tempting to derive proto-language forms from such terms, but often, such as in this case, it can be arguebly less than definitive.
Often these words create so-called false friends, where they appear related but really aren't. Another example of this would be like Old English Unraed and Modern English Unready - derived from different words but having meanings that could be construed related if we didn't know better.