Nut's Image: The Body That Is the Sky

Nut's most visible religious role in ancient Egypt was not narrative but iconographic: her elongated, star covered body, arched over the earth god Geb with fingers and toes touching the horizon on either side, became one of the most widely reproduced images in Egyptian funerary art, painted on coffin lids, carved into sarcophagus interiors and stretched across temple and tomb ceilings from the New Kingdom onward. The most famous surviving example decorates the ceiling of the tomb of Ramesses the Sixth in the Valley of the Kings, where Nut's body is shown twice, swallowing the sun disc at one end and giving birth to it at the other, illustrating the daily solar cycle her own myth explains: the sun passes into her mouth each evening and travels through her body overnight before being reborn from between her thighs each dawn. This same image, on a smaller scale, was painted or carved inside countless private coffins, positioning the deceased directly within Nut's protective, cyclically renewing body so that an ordinary person's burial itself became an act of temporary residence inside the goddess who guaranteed the sun's own return. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, among the oldest religious writings to survive from Egypt, already invoke Nut in exactly this protective role for royal burials, addressing her directly to receive and safeguard the king's body, so that her image's later spread to ordinary coffins extended a specifically royal funerary role to the whole of Egyptian society over the following centuries.