Egyptian cosmology

Egyptian cosmology

the world of Geb and Nut

The air-god Shu, flanked by the ram-headed Heh deities, separates the star-strewn Nut from the reclining Geb — from the Greenfield Papyrus (c. 950 BC). The arrangement requires, at all hours, someone on duty. British Museum, London.

Type	Religious cosmology
Earth	A flat plain — the god Geb
Sky	An arched vault — the goddess Nut
Held apart by	Shu, the air, standing between
The Sun	Ra, sailing a boat above the world by day and beneath it by night
Surrounded by	Nun, the primeval waters
Attested	From the third millennium BC
In fact
The earth	Round; and not, on inspection, a god
The night	The far side of one rotation

Egyptian cosmology is the picture of the world held in ancient Egypt across some three thousand years of religious thought: a flat earth lying beneath an arched sky, the two held apart by the air, with the Sun crossing above by day and below by night, and the whole risen from and ringed by a limitless primeval water.^[1] Its parts are gods — the earth a reclining god, the sky a goddess bent over him, the air a third standing between — but the structure they compose is a cosmology like any other, and answers the same questions: what holds up the sky, where the Sun goes at night, and what lies beyond the edge of the world.

It is among the oldest cosmologies for which a detailed account survives, set down in funerary texts, temple reliefs, and the painted insides of coffin lids. It is included here as one of the great early answers to the figure of the world — an answer in which the earth is flat, the sky is near, and both are, at bottom, persons.^[2]

The flat earth of Geb and the vault of Nut

The earth is Geb, a god lying on his back, and the inhabited world is his flat surface — the black soil of the Nile valley enlarged to the dimensions of the cosmos.^[3] Over him arches Nut, the sky: a goddess bent across the whole width of the world, her fingertips at one horizon and her toes at the other, her star-strewn body the vault of heaven. The two are wife and husband, and in the older reckoning lay once pressed together, with no room between them for anything to live — the cosmos as a closed seam, sky upon earth, the world not yet opened.

Shu, and the holding-apart of earth and sky

What opened the world was Shu, the god of the air and of light, who at the creator's command stepped between Geb and Nut and lifted the sky off the earth, holding it up on his raised arms.^[4] The daylight world — the space in which everything happens — is, in this account, simply the gap Shu holds open; and because he must hold it, the standing of the world is permanent labour rather than settled fact. Were he to tire, the sky would come back down and the seam would close. Night, in the gentlest reading, is the sky leaning lower; the end of the world, the sky at rest again upon the earth.

This makes the Egyptian sky, like the firmament of the neighbouring cosmologies, a real and load-bearing thing — but held up by a person rather than propped on pillars or set firm as a dome.

The daily voyage of Ra

The Sun is Ra, and he does not so much rise and set as travel.^[5] By day he sails the length of Nut's body in a boat, the solar barque, from the eastern horizon to the western; by night he passes into the Duat, the underworld beneath the earth, and sails its length from west back to east, to be born again at dawn. The model has a real economy: the Sun is never destroyed and never absent, only out of sight, conducting beneath the world the same journey it makes above. The hazards of the voyage are charted in detail — chiefly the serpent Apep, who waits in the Duat to swallow the barque, and is each night repelled.

The waters of Nun

Before any of it, and around all of it, is Nun: the limitless, lightless primeval water, out of which the first land rose as a mound, and on which the whole ordered world still floats.^[6] The cosmos is, in this picture, a bubble of air and light and dry ground held open inside an endless sea — Shu's gap kept clear within Nun's water. It is a cosmography candid about its edge and its outside: beyond the world is more water, and the world is what was, briefly, made dry.

Its place among the world's cosmographies

The Egyptian world is one of the oldest and most fully drawn of the flat-earth cosmographies, and shares its bones with the others.^[7] Its ringing ocean is the Bitter River of the Babylonian Map of the World and the encircling sea of Norse cosmology; its held-up sky is the cousin of the gai tian canopy and of every firmament; its flat earth is the same flat plain from which Anaximander, and much later Eratosthenes, would set out to take the measure of a round one. What is distinctive in the Egyptian account is its staffing: where other cosmologies prop the sky on a structure, this one assigns it to a god — and so makes the standing of the world a thing that must, each day and each night, be actively done.

See also

• Earth — the world as since measured, and found round
• The figure of the Earth — the shape, taken in hand
• Flat Earth — the level world, of which this is among the oldest pictures
• Firmament — the held-up sky, in its Near Eastern form
• Babylonian Map of the World — the disc ringed by the Bitter River
• Gai tian — the canopy heaven over a square earth
• Norse cosmology — the middle-world ringed by sea
• Hindu cosmology — the world borne up, in another telling
• Anaximander — who set a flat earth free in space

References

1. ^ The picture given here is a composite of the standard arrangement; Egyptian cosmology was not a single fixed system but a family of local theologies — Heliopolitan, Hermopolitan, Memphite — sharing most of their furniture. The figures named, Geb, Nut, Shu, Ra, and Nun, are common to the main traditions.
2. ^ The sources are chiefly funerary: the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, and the painted lids of coffins, on which Nut is frequently shown arched over the dead in the posture she keeps over the world.
3. ^ Geb is, unusually among the earth deities of the world's mythologies, male, and the sky, Nut, female — the reverse of the commoner arrangement, and a point on which the cosmology is quietly singular.
4. ^ The scene of Shu lifting Nut from Geb is among the most reproduced in Egyptian art, and is as near as the tradition comes to an engineering diagram: the load above, the support between, the floor below, drawn to be understood at a glance.
5. ^ Ra's nightly passage through the Duat is charted hour by hour in the funerary "books of the underworld" — the Amduat, the Book of Gates — which read, in places, like an itinerary: twelve hours, twelve regions, one boat.
6. ^ Nun is neither created nor ended; it is the condition before and around creation. The ordered cosmos is, in this reading, on permanent loan from the water, and returns to it in the end.
7. ^ On Nut as the visible Milky Way — the band of the galaxy mapped onto the goddess's arched body — see the external reference below; the identification, if right, makes the most literal of skies out of the most figurative of goddesses.

External links

• The ancient Egyptian personification of the Milky Way as the sky goddess Nut (Or Graur, Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage)
• Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths: From Watery Chaos to Cosmic Egg — Glencairn Museum (Dr. Jennifer Houser Wegner, Penn Museum)
• The Greenfield Papyrus — object page, British Museum — the Book of the Dead of Nestanebetisheru (c. 950 BC), source of the Shu–Nut–Geb scene reproduced above