Egyptian cosmogony begins in water. Before there was land there was Nun, the inert ocean, and the first thing to break its surface was a blue lotus that opened at dawn and closed again at dusk. Out of that flower came the sun. Nefertem is the god of the flower and, in the oldest surviving Egyptian religious texts, of the moment itself: the Pyramid Texts call him the lotus blossom at the nose of Ra, an image that makes the newborn sun a scent as much as a light.
That one line does a great deal of work. It ties Nefertem to the daily sunrise and not only to the first one, so every morning repeats the creation, and it makes fragrance a theological category rather than a luxury. A god of perfume in Egypt is not a god of vanity. He is the god of what the world smelled like on its first day.
The flower itself is Nymphaea caerulea, the blue Egyptian water lily, which is not a true lotus at all. It appears on tomb walls, on banquet furniture, in the hands of guests at feasts and heaped across coffins, and its habit of opening in the morning and sinking at night made it an obvious emblem of a sun that dies and returns. Nefertem wears it: he is a young man crowned with an open blue lotus, and the crown is how you identify him when nothing else in the scene will tell you.
The best known object in this key is not a temple statue. A painted wooden head from the tomb of Tutankhamun shows the boy king rising out of an open lotus, and it is read as the king taking Nefertem's role, coming up with the sun on the first morning of his own afterlife.