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Egyptian Gods – The Complete List (2016) (worldhistory.org)
86 points by Schwolop on Sept 11, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 31 comments



Thoth has long been my favourite ancient Egyptian anthropomorphism.

Pick a deity, any deity. Your credulance is worth less than another's coin. Shall we spill some blood in sacrifice?

Oh look, the water's rising, see you next year with your rudimentary approximation of calcuable area.

How's Osiris getting on?


Thoth, or Hermes Trismegistus.

Something incredibly alluring about his lore.


Which is related to Shiva and Mercury.

Since Thoth is a shapeshifter, who knows their true name. Always comes in waves of three though.


Hermes is definitely the god of the internet -- the messenger god and tricker god in one.


Clearly, the god of the internet is Hastur (Nyarlathotep).


Ptah, the god of design!

When the black Nubian pharaohs reunited Egypt in the 8th century BC, they restored his temples in Memphis and claimed to have found an ancient first dynasty scroll that they copied to "the Shabaka Stone".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabaka_Stone


Here's a selection of the content, which is written in the style of the old kingdom and claims to be from a first dynasty scroll:

[Ptah made all the gods and Ptah] "is the one who makes… that which comes forth from every body, and from every mouth, of all gods, of all people, of all cattle, of all reptiles, which lives, thinking and commanding… everything that he wills….

The [gods] fashioned the sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, and the smelling of the nose, that they might furnish the desire of the heart. It (the heart) is the one that [brings] forth every successful issue. It is the tongue which repeats the thought of the heart; it (the heart) is the fashioner of all [gods], at the time when every divine word even came into existence by the thought of the heart, and command of the tongue…"


I remember him from Pharaoh, the video game ! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh_(video_game)


I don’t see Medjed on the list.

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


Imhotep - The vizier of king Djoser (c. 2670 BCE) who designed and built the Step Pyramid. He lived c. 2667-2600 BCE and was a polymath expert in many fields of study. His name means "He Who Comes in Peace" and, after his death, he was deified as a god of wisdom and medicine. He was identified by the Greeks with Aesculapius and was invoked in spells for healing. His medical treatises claimed, against convential belief, that disease was natural in origin and not a punishment from the gods.


If a web site claimed it was "Programming Languages - The Complete List", with a list of a few dozens items, would it be popular? It would describe POP-1 in one sentence, same as Lua, B or Caml. Some influential languages would be missing, while others would appear in the list though they were in used for a limited time in a single lab. And the most important point: would it mean anything to anyone who does not yet know the various paradigms of programming?

I see little value in such lists. The few paragraphs of general introduction are more interesting, but I don't think it's enough to understand how gods were perceived during the 3 millenniums of Ancient Egypt. For instance, there was an essential concept of "Maat" (order of the world). And some Egyptian gods could age and die.

If you're interested in the subject, I strongly recommend "Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt" by E. Hornung.


>I see little value in such lists.

Maybe to people especially interested in the subject, but to those with a casual interest, such lists can be a fun introduction to a subject as it provides a way to write a lot of little vignettes. Witness other comments to this post calling out and talking about some of the things they saw in this list that they liked.


The problem is that, sometimes, simplistic introductions do more harm than good to understanding of a subject - especially when they are presented as introductions to a subject.

This list is similar to explanations of quantum computing that claim the qbits solve all versions of the problem in parallel - it may give you a wrong intuition about what the subject even is. In this case, it may make you think that there were actual humans that worshiped all of these gods and only these gods - when in fact, over 3000 years of Egyptian civilization, gods changed and merged and so on; and most likely the very idea of worship and humans' relationship with the gods changed.


I know some of these names thanks to Stargate sg1.


Egyptian Goa'ulds - The Complete List


Who's the fun god? Who's the sun god? Ra! Ra! Ra!


"Shed - A protective god who guarded against personal harm from wild animals or mortal enemies"

Was really hoping that this would continue with "... and who therefore gives his name to the garden shed / man cave", but alas there is apparently no such etymology


Where these gods all concurrent? It would be interesting to see how they fade in and fade out over the 3,000 of ancient Egypt history.

The civilization in some for or another existed form longer than the time that has elapsed between now and the founding of Rome.


They belong to different periods, but sometimes gods just merge into another, i.e. one becomes "an aspect" of another.

Some in the list are not even different gods, just different names of the same God, and some are "recent" synchretic gods, when Greek/Roman ones merged with previous ones.

Fascinating stuff!


I really like this statue of Sobek, the crocodile diety: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sobek_Oxford.jpg


I often joke (well, mostly to myself) that Horus was actually the First Avenger.



I'm not a comics expert but the marvel universe incorporated Egyptian gods as the heliopolitans, and Apocalypse was an ancient Egyptian too.

So, your idea seems plausible in some parallel earth-xyz :)


You may have gotten the reference already, but–I was actually referring to Horus being known as 'The Avenger' because he avenged the murder of his father Osiris by his uncle Set.


Was the giganticism in architecture connected to finding big bonny dinosaur remains that were believed to be gods?


I'm going to go with... no? I have also seen claims of hieroglyphs that represent dinosaurs, and claims of dinosaurs living with the Egyptians. I'm not sure what the fascination is with connecting ancient Egyptian culture with dinosaurs, but clearly there's some draw there.


No.


There's over 2,000 Egyptian Deities, that list has 246 lol


Christianism has a lot of saints too.


[flagged]


Wait, I missed that. What is that all about?


what? where at?




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