Domain / Function

This group holds the deities of ancient Egyptian religion, worshipped along the Nile for more than three thousand years. Egyptian gods are marked by their fluid, composite forms (human bodies with animal heads, gods who merge and split, local deities who rise to national importance), and by a theology bound tightly to kingship, the sun and the afterlife.

The browser will find the sun-god Ra in his many forms, the Osiris myth cycle (Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, Nephthys) that structured beliefs about death and rulership, the creator Atum and the ordering goddess Maat, and figures such as Thoth, Anubis, Hathor, Ptah and Amun who dominated particular eras and cities.

Egyptian religion changed across its long history (the brief monotheism of Akhenaten's Aten, the rise of Amun-Ra at Thebes, the late syncretism that carried Isis across the Roman world), and the entries flag which period a form belongs to.

Much of what survives concerns the passage of the dead and the divine role of the pharaoh, recorded in temple reliefs and funerary texts such as the Book of the Dead. The atlas describes each god's domains, cult centres and iconography as the sources present them.