Legends Library

Egyptian Legends

Ra: The Sun God of Ancient Egypt

Ra was the supreme sun god of ancient Egypt, the creator of the world, who sailed across the sky by day and journeyed through the underworld by night.

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The most powerful god in the entire Egyptian pantheon was, simply, the sun. His name was Ra (also written Re, or in later periods Amun-Ra), and he was believed to be the sun itself — the great golden disk that rose in the east each morning, climbed to its zenith at noon, and descended into the west each evening to begin the long journey through the underworld. He was the creator of the world, the king of the gods, the father of the pharaohs, and the daily guarantor that the universe would not fall back into chaos.

For nearly three thousand years of pharaonic history, Ra was the center of Egyptian religious life. His cult at Heliopolis was the great school of theology from which the Ennead of nine gods emerged, the myths of the Osiris cycle were framed, and the doctrines of kingship were defined. When the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, the rulers of the New Kingdom empire, wished to proclaim their divine authority, they took the title “Son of Ra” as their second of five royal names. The dead pharaoh became Osiris, but the living pharaoh was Ra incarnate.

Iconography: The Falcon, the Disk, the Cobra

In his standard form, Ra was depicted as a man with the head of a falcon, crowned with a great sun disk encircled by the sacred uraeus — the rearing cobra that symbolized royal authority and divine protection. The disk and the uraeus together were the hieroglyphic sign of Ra’s name, and they appeared on the crowns of the pharaohs, on the lintels of the temples, and on the standards carried before the god in procession.

The falcon itself was an animal of power in Egypt. Its ability to soar high into the sky, to see without blinking, and to dive at incredible speed made it the natural symbol of the sun’s daily flight. The Horus of the early dynastic period, the falcon god of the sky, was gradually identified with Ra, and in the New Kingdom the compound “Ra-Horakhty” — “Ra-Horus of the two horizons” — became one of the most common names for the sun god.

In his more ancient form, Ra appeared as a falcon perched on a standard, with the sun disk perched on his head, or as a winged disk that flew above the temples and protected them from harm. In the royal mortuary temples, this winged disk of Ra-Horakhty was painted on the rear walls to ward off the demons of the night, and the image is still visible today at the great temple of Hathor at Dendera.

The Daily Journey: Mandjet and Mesektet

Ra’s defining myth was his daily journey. Each morning, he was born again from the body of the sky goddess Nut, emerging from her womb at the eastern horizon. He stepped into a great solar barque called the Mandjet (the “Boat of a Million Years”) and sailed westward across the sky, passing over the lands of Egypt in a continuous arc.

At noon, Ra reached the apex of his flight. He was at his most powerful then, at his brightest, the noon-day sun whose heat was believed to drive the demons of the night back into the desert. The noon-day Ra was the king of the world, the lord of all he surveyed. He was the same god whose eye was the terrible Eye of Ra — the sun’s destructive power, embodied in the lion goddess Sekhmet and the cow-headed Hathor and the cat-headed Bastet.

In the evening, Ra reached the western horizon. He was swallowed by the sky goddess Nut, and the day ended. Now he was in the underworld, sailing through the twelve hours of the night in a different barque called the Mesektet (sometimes called the “Night Barque”). His journey through the Duat is the subject of an entire family of funerary texts, including the Amduat, the Book of Gates, and the Book of Caverns — texts painted on the walls of the New Kingdom royal tombs to help the dead pharaoh travel with Ra. His passage is recounted in detail in the legend of Ra’s journey through the Duat.

At dawn, Ra emerged from the eastern horizon as a child, and the cycle began again.

The Creation of the World

According to the theology of Heliopolis, Ra (in his form as Atum, the “Completed One,” or as Ra-Atum) was the self-created god who brought the world into being. The story, recorded in the Pyramid Texts and in the New Kingdom theological compendia, runs as follows:

In the beginning, there was only Nun, the primordial ocean, the dark, infinite, motionless water. Out of this water, on the first morning, Atum rose, either on the primordial mound (the benben, the first bit of dry land to emerge from the flood) or from within a lotus flower that bloomed on the surface. He was alone, and he was the source of all that was to come.

Atum then produced the first pair of gods. By his own will, by his very thought, he created Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture), who together made up the first couple. Shu and Tefnut in turn produced Geb (earth) and Nut (sky), and Geb and Nut produced Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. The nine gods together formed the Ennead of Heliopolis, the divine council that ruled the universe.

In a slightly different tradition, Ra was said to have created humanity from his tears — that when he wept, the first men and women were formed from the drops. The Greeks heard this story from the priests of Egypt and passed it on; the Roman author Pliny the Elder recorded it in his Natural History, and Plutarch discussed it in De Iside et Osiride.

The Eye of Ra

One of the most important aspects of Ra was his Eye — the goddess who represented the dangerous, active, protective power of the sun. The Eye of Ra was, in different myths, Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of war, Hathor, the cow-headed goddess of love, and Bastet, the cat-headed goddess of the home. Each was a manifestation of the same terrifying divine force.

The most famous myth of the Eye of Ra is the story of the Destruction of Mankind. According to a tale preserved on a New Kingdom papyrus and discussed at length by the Greek geographer Strabo, Ra grew old and humanity began to plot against him. He sent his Eye — in the form of the lion goddess Sekhmet — to punish them. Sekhmet went on a rampage, killing the people by the thousands and drinking their blood. When Ra saw how much she was killing, he had beer dyed red and poured it out in her path. Sekhmet drank it, became drunk, slept for three days, and awoke as Hathor, the gentler goddess. The story was the mythic explanation for the annual flooding of the Nile, which the Egyptians said was caused by the red beer Sekhmet drank.

Amun-Ra and the Theban Theology

In the New Kingdom, the priests of Thebes elevated their local god Amun to the rank of king of the gods and identified him with Ra as Amun-Ra. Amun had originally been a god of hiddenness, one of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis, but as the Theban dynasties of the Middle and New Kingdoms made their city the capital of Egypt, Amun absorbed more and more of the solar theology. By the time of Ramesses II, Amun-Ra was the supreme god of the empire, and his high priest at Karnak was one of the most powerful men in Egypt.

The identification of Amun with Ra was a brilliant piece of religious politics. It allowed the Theban priests to claim for their god the entire tradition of solar theology — the daily journey, the nightly battle, the creation of the world — without giving up Amun’s own character as the hidden, mysterious, and self-generated source of all life. The result was a god who was at once the sun in the sky and the deepest secret of the universe, the visible disk and the invisible source of all visibility.

The Aten and Akhenaten

In the fourteenth century BCE, the pharaoh Akhenaten (originally Amenhotep IV) attempted to revolutionize Egyptian religion by suppressing the worship of Amun and elevating the Aten — the physical disk of the sun — to the status of the only true god. The Aten was not a person in the traditional sense; it was the actual visible sun, the source of all life, before whom the king and the royal family prostrated themselves in daily worship.

Akhenaten built a new capital at Akhetaten (modern Tell el-Amarna) and composed the Great Hymn to the Aten, one of the most beautiful religious poems of the ancient world, which praised the sun for giving life to the egg in the eggshell, to the seed in the earth, to the fish in the river, and to the chick in the egg. After his death, however, the old religion was restored. His monuments were torn down, his name was erased from the king lists, and the cult of Amun-Ra was reinstated. The experiment of Akhenaten, for all its brilliance, did not survive.

The Myth of Isis and the Secret Name of Ra

In the New Kingdom, a remarkable myth appeared in which the goddess Isis, the most powerful magician among the gods, used her wiles to learn the secret name of Ra. The name of a god, in Egyptian belief, was the source of his power; to know a god’s secret name was to have power over him. According to the myth, Isis caused a serpent to bite Ra, and when the great god writhed in pain, she offered to cure him in exchange for his secret name. Ra was forced to give it, and Isis used the name to gain the magical power she needed to bring Osiris back to life.

The myth reveals the Egyptian belief that even the supreme sun god was subject, in some sense, to the laws of magic, and that the greatest gods could be compelled by the proper rituals. It is also one of the key stories that established Isis as the most powerful magician in the Egyptian pantheon, a role she would carry with her when her cult spread through the Greco-Roman world.

The Battle with Apep

Each night, as Ra traveled through the Duat, the chaos serpent Apep (also called Apophis) tried to devour the solar barque. Apep was the embodiment of all that opposed the sun: darkness, disorder, the primordial chaos of Nun from which the world had emerged. If Apep won the battle, the sun would not rise, the Nile would not flood, and the world would end.

To prevent this catastrophe, Ra was accompanied by a host of protective gods: Sia (perception), Hu (authoritative speech), Mehen (the coiled serpent who wrapped himself around the solar barque to defend it), and the gatekeepers of each of the twelve hours of the night. The priests of Egypt performed daily rituals to help Ra defeat Apep — burning wax effigies of the serpent, reciting spells from the Book of Apep, and spitting on wax images of the monster.

The myth of Apep was one of the most important theological ideas in Egyptian religion: the idea that the cosmic order had to be re-asserted each day, that the gods themselves struggled against the forces of chaos, and that the survival of the world depended on the proper performance of the rituals.

The Cult of Heliopolis and the Theological Schools

The cult of Ra was centered at Heliopolis (called Iunu, “the pillars,” in Egyptian), a city in the northern suburbs of modern Cairo. Although little remains of the city today — most of its stones were quarried for medieval Cairo — Heliopolis was for over two thousand years the great school of Egyptian theology. The Mansion of the Prince (the Pr-Anx, the “House of Life”) at Heliopolis was the place where the priests composed the Pyramid Texts and trained the scribes who would serve in the temples of the entire country.

Heliopolis was the source of the doctrine of the Ennead, of the royal names, of the rituals of the temple, and of much of the funerary theology that spread through Egypt. The high priest of Ra at Heliopolis was one of the most important religious figures in Egypt, and in some periods of the Old Kingdom, he was more powerful than the vizier himself.

The Syncretism of Ra

Egyptian religion was not centralized, and Ra was identified with many other gods. He was Ra-Horakhty in the east, Atum in the west, Khepri (the scarab) in the morning, and Atum (the old man) in the evening. He was Amun-Ra at Thebes, Sobek-Ra at the Fayum, Montu-Ra at Armant, and Khnum-Ra at Elephantine. In each of these local forms, the god took on a different character, and the same solar theology was adapted to different local traditions.

The flexibility of Ra — the ability to absorb other gods and to be identified with them — was one of the reasons for his long survival. In a religious system that had no central text or church council, the polytheism of Egypt was constantly being revised, and Ra was the figure around which the revisions revolved.

Ra and the Dead

Ra’s daily journey was the model for the journey of the soul after death. The Egyptians believed that the dead, like Ra, would travel through the Duat, face the dangers of the night, and emerge at dawn reborn. The Pyramid Texts, the oldest religious literature in the world, contain spells to help the dead pharaoh join Ra in his barque, to identify the dead with the sun, and to ensure that the soul would rise again each morning.

In the New Kingdom, the identification of the dead pharaoh with Osiris became more important than the identification with Ra, but the older solar theology never disappeared. The Book of the Dead contains spells to make the deceased “follow Ra” through the day, and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings are aligned to the rising sun.

The King of the Gods

For most of pharaonic history, Ra was the king of the gods. He was the father of Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys, according to one tradition; the husband of Hathor in another; and the self-created source of all the other gods in yet another. The pharaohs took his name as their throne name (the prenomen), and their mortuary temples were called “houses of millions of years” (hwt-ptah, a name later applied to Memphis and then to Cairo).

When Christianity and then Islam arrived in Egypt, the cult of Ra faded, but his mythology did not disappear. The sun’s daily journey, the fight against chaos, the death and resurrection of the divine king — these themes have been preserved in the western imagination through three thousand years of art, literature, and scholarship, and they continue to shape how we think about the sun, the king, and the soul.

Last reviewed: June 2026.