Origins of the Egyptian Gods
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It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and welcome to our newest miniseries all about the ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses. Over five episodes this September and October, we're going to be exploring these mysterious deities. Now, at first you might think, oh, this is going to be like their previous Greek gods and goddesses miniseries, but no.

The Egyptian deities, figures like Artem, Ra, Anubis, Isis, Osiris, Hathor and many others often represented with animal heads, well they are much, much more enigmatic and just as, if not more, extraordinary. In today's episode, the first of the series, we're starting it off with the story of how the Egyptians believed their gods came into existence, the so-called Ennead.

We kick off this episode with a retelling of this story, following which we have an interview with the fantastic Egyptologist Dr Joyce Tildesley from the University of Manchester, who will be one of our main experts for this series. This is a fascinating topic that Joyce expertly untangles for us, so sit back, relax and enjoy the story of the origins of the Egyptian gods. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

The Nile flows north and the wind blows south. These things will always be. Waves. They speak of Nun, the primordial ocean that existed before all other things. Endless. Boundless. Lifeless. Nun's currents are chaotic, with swells and eddies that not even the oldest souls could navigate.

And so no one, not even the gods, can say how the change happens. Perhaps it is some fusion, some consequence of tide crashing against tide. Whatever its cause, a change does come. Something rises from the waters of noon, and instead of fluid, it has form. It is a new state, this mound, the red earth on which the first god takes solid shape. Does he grow?

Hatch, Blossom, does he speak himself into existence? His origin is as debated as his name, Aton. And Aton, well, he's lonely. He searches the dry red earth and finds no other. He scans the horizon and sees nothing but the endless ocean. He peers into the depths of noon and is met only by his own image. Skin of beating gold, shining bright as the sun.

but the reflection is inspiration. So, he takes himself into his hands, he takes his life force into his mouth, and he speaks company into being. They are a son, Shu, and a daughter, Tafnut. Tafnut is the moist breeze, the dew upon the reeds. Shu is the dry air, the breath in your lungs. They are lovers, the wind to each other's sail.

and so conception is easy for them. She gusts, he gulls, he billows, she brews. They storm hot air-meeting cool and give birth to a son, Geb, and a daughter, Nut. But the personalities of their children are not nearly so complementary. You see, Geb is a god of practicalities, of all things tactile. Muddy hands, dusted knees, sweated brows,

He's always starting some new creation. He'll furrow fields into his limbs, a patchwork of cells and seedbeds irrigated by vein and artery. He'll whittle his bones into peaks and plateaus, messes and mounds. But he can be fickle too, changeable as the seasons. Newt, on the other hand, she is reliable, stubborn. She has her mind set on higher mysteries, on theory and philosophy.

on the deliberations of their divinity. Her skin is her chalkboard. She scratches out proofs, theorems, symbols that twinkle and shine like constellations. And though she ponders questions without answers, she's dogged in their pursuit. Geb, he sees it another way. His wife's contemplation of those stars that feckle her body, it's little more than navel-gazing. And Newt, she believes Geb an idiot.

He'd carve out a beach just so he could stick his head in the sand. You may think it's some mere squabble, but disorder in the royal house is disorder in the world. It is a chaos that frustrates the cycle of all things. A shoe laid with tefnut, so gib lies with nut. But their clash is so fierce, so all-consuming, that it hinders the birth of their children, the next generation of gods.

Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Naphthys. And so, Shu and Tafnut must intervene. She gusts, he gulls, he billows, she brews. They storm hot air meeting cool, and with looks black as thunder, the parents drive themselves between their quarrelsome children. However, then, Geb and Nut are separated.

Geb is pushed down. His fertile flesh becomes the good black mud. Nut is heaved up. Her star-studded skin becomes the sky, a firmament to keep out the primeordial ocean. It is the birth of the world as you know it, a sliver of order, of might. It is the world that the Enyad, the nine gods, rule.

It is the world that the Pharaoh must maintain on their behalf.

Joyce, welcome back to the podcast. It is such a pleasure to have you on The Ancients again. Oh, thank you. It's a great pleasure to be invited. I love talking on these podcasts. And we are doing it again in your office. And it wasn't long ago that we recorded our last chat all about the Great Pyramid of Giza. That episode proved incredibly popular. So when the decision was made to do this mini-series on the Egyptian gods and goddesses, we knew that we had to get you to be one of our star contributors. And

It feels like the first thing to highlight with Egyptian mythology, having just done a whole series on Greek mythology and gods and goddesses, Egyptian mythology, it's very different. It's a completely different kettle of fish. It is. And I think that's purely because there's so much of it.

Because if you think about the time span, Egyptian dynastic age, the time that Egypt was ruled by a pharaoh, that stretches for about 3,000 years. So that's quite a long time anyway. We've also got to add on the time immediately before that, because just because Egypt unified and started to be ruled by a pharaoh, there were already certain underlying beliefs there. People were burying people in graves with grave goods and so on. There were already shrines to the gods. So you've got to add on to

probably about a thousand years again. So you're looking at 4,000 years of history from a long thin country, which is a long distance from the southernmost border at Aswan to the Mediterranean Sea. So obviously ideas are going to change over that geographically and in time. So we're looking at

massive amount of information and all a bit disjointed. I mean, to me, that's one of the pleasures of studying this because it's not straightforward. It's a bit like a detective puzzle. We have to extract bits of clues and put it together and really try and understand what the ancient people themselves would have understood by mythology. And because Egypt is so vast and over such a huge amount of time, different gods and goddesses were more important in certain areas of Egypt, let's say as one, compared to

other areas, maybe further north, let's say Memphis, nearer the Nile Delta, at different times over Egypt's long history. Absolutely. I think it's a mistake to imagine that ancient Egypt had a religion. We do often, and it's a shorthand, talk about the religion of Egypt. I know I do it myself. But actually, what you've got is a whole lot of separate cults existing side by side,

And there isn't one that's right and one that's wrong. There's no Egyptian book of rules or the equivalent of, say, a Bible, which tells you what you should believe. There's no official mythology. So instead, people are pretty much free to believe what they want to believe. And people tend to believe what they're brought up to believe by their families. That will, as you say, it'll depend where you live and when you live and what you're told by the people around you.

It's interesting, though, because it means that things can't be wrong, so people can believe what they want. And if you decide, well, the local god isn't the god for me, I'm going to be more devoted to this god, that is absolutely fine. It's not a problem for anyone. But it does mean if we're trying to get a cohesive mythology out of it, we have to remember that everything evolves, that people aren't all believing the same thing. So, for example, again, if you're in Taswan,

The story of the creation that you understand and you accept is likely to be very different from the story of the creation that somebody living in Memphis 2,000 years later is going to understand. And as well, that's really at the far south of ancient Egypt, isn't it? Where you get lots of black granite and stuff from, isn't it? It's basically the traditional southern border. Sometimes Egypt pushes south into Nubia and sometimes it stays there.

But that area of Egypt gets more southern influences from within Africa. And at the opposite extreme, on the Mediterranean coast, there are more influences coming in from the Mediterranean world. So all these influences are coming in all the time as well. And the Egyptians are very flexible in their pantheon. They don't mind adding gods and goddesses in. So if there's a well-known god or goddess...

becomes famous in Egypt, they will just add it into their own mythology or him or her, I shouldn't say it. But yeah, they'll add that god into their own mythology. So it's very flexible. And it makes it even more confusing when we remember that also the gods themselves, the Egyptian gods can split and have different aspects of the same god. So Horus is a good example of that. There are lots of forms of Horus, the best known ones being Horus the Elder and Horus the Child.

But you can also get gods that come together. So you'll get two really good gods, really strong, brave gods, will come together to form one super god. So for example, Amun-Rei of Thebes, the god of the New Kingdom Empire, is composed of the god Amun and the god Re. And separately, they are powerful gods, but they come together and become one super god. I mean, a super important deity in the creation of that amazing temple complex, Karnak today in Luxor. Yes, yes.

It's also interesting, isn't it? Influences coming in, but I'm guessing also influences going out. Do we sometimes see examples of certain Egyptian deities in places outside of Egypt, like in Nubia or elsewhere? We do, yes, because that's the Egyptian empire.

expands and contracts, they take their gods with them. But also in time, it's quite interesting, but some Egyptian gods and goddesses are still being worshipped today, Isis in particular. There are temples to Isis around the world. Sekhmet and other goddesses, a fairly recent temple to Sekhmet being built in the States. Wow. So these gods, they don't just stop at the end of dynastic period either. Some of them continue into Roman religion.

and continued on from that. So yes, really, you're looking from sort of

Well, much more than 5,000. I'm trying to do the maths here. They've got a longevity because their stories and their way of being appeal to people, I think. I love the idea. Maybe I'm going a bit too far here. That maybe in some parts of the world, there's a small group of people worshipping Sobek, the crocodile god. But maybe not. But hey, we'll move on from that straight away. I was just going to say that the Egyptian gods have even made it into Doctor Who. But maybe that is going a bit too far. But yes.

Well, I want to kick off this series, this mini-series, by exploring the sources. You've already highlighted how this is a very different mythology to that of the ancient Greeks. I mean, so what types of sources do figures like yourself have to try and piece together

key stories, narratives of these Egyptian deities? As I said, we're missing any sort of key instruction book. We don't think there ever was one because there is no overriding rule that goes over all the Egyptian cults. But the fact that the Egyptian temples were destroyed at the end of the dynastic ages has certainly not helped. A lot of information, key information we assume, has been lost. So what we're finding is sort of bits of evidence, fragments of evidence,

evidence produced by people who knew what they were doing, but they weren't trying to teach other people what they were doing, if you know what I mean. And it's archaeological evidence, there's written evidence, and there's evidence from classical historians who visited Egypt and wrote about it. I mean, the most obvious, I guess, is the archaeological evidence, because we've got temples and we've got tombs.

We've got a lot of tombs that have been excavated. So we know a lot, or we think we know a lot, about the mortuary type of myths, you know, myths about death and the afterlife and so on. But that has slightly biased our approach. We are missing the equivalent myths more connected to life. And it gives the impression that Egyptians were absolutely obsessed with death.

They weren't. It's just that the tombs have survived because they were dug into the sand or they were built out of stone, whereas the houses were made out of mud brick and have vanished. Similarly, the later temples were made out of stone. The earlier ones weren't. They were more flimsy and they were made out of mud brick or they might have been made out of reeds and- Reeds? Yes, yes. Or even open sacred areas. We don't know if we go right back

Because what we have preserved are the stone temples. And we imagine that they were always like that, but they weren't. In fact, a lot of the temples that are preserved are actually Ptolemaic temples. We can't assume- So those are the Greeks who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great. Yes. So really late dating. But the one thing that these stone tombs and these stone temples have is a lot of stone wall. And people were able to write on that and it's been preserved.

So we can read, not only do we have the architecture, but we can also read on the walls what people are thinking and we can look at images that they've left us. And that helps us too. But again...

always bearing in mind that they're not leaving it as an explanation for us. It's part of their approach to the god, if you like. So first, I'm guessing that explains why, let's say, certain Egyptian deities like Anubis and Osiris are so well known today because of that obsession that some people today think the Egyptians had, but because of that bias of the surviving archaeological material. Yes.

But also interesting then with the reliefs with the art and architecture on temple and the writing on the walls, should we therefore be imagining almost artistic depictions of scenes from particular myths and then writing next to it kind of almost being a description explaining what's being depicted? Yes, or bits of spells that are put on the walls as well. But there's nothing so clear as the scenes from the mythology. That makes it seem very simple, you know, like you've got almost a cartoon book. We don't have a whole series of myths. We do mini-myths.

But the temples tend to be connected with the king because the king is the head of all the cults in Egypt. So the king technically is the head priest of every temple. So when we look at the temple walls built by the king for his god, they will feature the king.

Even though we know that the king couldn't possibly attend every temple to do every service or every offering for every god, he has to use deputies, he has to use priests because he just couldn't do it. There's not enough hours in the day for him to have done it. Temples built by kings always feature the king in a prominent position interacting with the god himself.

So again, it sort of slightly skews our understanding of what actually happened in the temple as opposed to what in theory should have happened in the temple. But it's quite interesting if you look at some of the temples that were built, you can see that they sort of resemble the cosmos. So for example, if you go into a traditional temple, you'll find that the ground will rise as you go towards the darkness of the sanctuary and away from the door. It's reflecting the mound of creation, which we're going to talk about soon. So the architecture itself can actually mirror a

a myth in a way that isn't necessarily obvious unless you know the myth. We might not understand why the floor rises unless we know of the story behind it. Mm-hmm.

So anyway, that's one form of evidence. I mean, that is one form of evidence. I mean, it just goes to my mind as we go to another form before we get to the creation. I mean, Greek travellers, people who came to Egypt with their own mythology, they must have been blown away. They must have been amazed by all of this, the architecture, the art, and the stories that they must have heard about Egyptian gods and goddesses. They were. They were hugely impressed. And they wanted to impress their classical readers.

well, I was going to say readers. I don't know whether these books are actually read so much as read out to people, but however, who was listening to the stories and absorbing them, they wanted to tell them all about it.

But they didn't always get it right because the visitors couldn't necessarily speak Egyptian. Herodotus is the classical one. Ah, yes, father of history. Yeah. He tells us a lot about ancient Egypt. Some of what he says seems to be spot on. His description of mummification seems really, really good from what we can see. He's obviously talked to someone and been well translated and got that right. But other aspects of what he tells us are just plain wrong. So we have to take it with a pinch of salt. And Herodotus also does what a lot of people have tried to do, not just classical authorities.

But they've tried to take the Egyptian gods and make them explicable to their readers by translating them into the gods that the readers will understand. So, for example, he will take a goddess or a god and say this is the Egyptian version of a Vulcan or whatever. And, of course, it doesn't work like that. You can't translate the gods from one.

one form of religion into the gods from another although they really did try to you see that with so many different ancient societies they really try yes yeah because he wants his readers to understand what's going on and this is the only way they can he's writing the first book like this and they've never come across anything like this you can totally understand why he's doing it but it's a very bad ethnology you shouldn't do that he

He wouldn't have known that. And I don't want to be mean to Herodotus, but he wrote a fascinating book. I would recommend it to anybody. But we can't always believe everything he says, I guess is what I'm saying. What we have to do is pick and choose from that as well. Pick and choose from the archaeological records, other writings that the Egyptians themselves left us. There are pyramid texts, coffin texts, again, connected with mortuary texts.

archaeology, but there's also more incidental writings. There are stories which have mythological elements in them, and there are things like medical papyri which you wouldn't think of as being connected with mythology.

But for the Egyptians, there was no real distinction between science and religion. So if you were trying to do a book of recipes to cure things, you would give the actual recipe bit, and that would be the scientific bit. It would be maybe take some honey and put it on the eyelids or whatever, and that is fine. But there will also be a little incantation to a god that goes with that because it would be as important to the Egyptians that you did the spell part of it as it would be to do the actual practical recipe part.

that we would recognize today as a prescription. So from that, again, we can pick up evidence. And it's just this process of going through whatever we find, looking at it, and trying to see where it fits into things, always bearing in mind that we're biased towards the mortuary because we have far more mortuary evidence

I mean, firstly, when you were talking about Herodotus, I feel an episode all about Herodotus and just in Egypt and his relationship with Egypt is an episode that we have to do on the ancients in the future. Absolutely. That would be fascinating. I know, absolutely, because otherwise Herodotus you can do on one big episode, but actually focusing on Egypt, there's so much you can explore.

But from what you're saying there, with the different types of sources we have surviving, these different chunks from different types of sources, it feels like an incredibly complicated puzzle for people trying to learn more about particular mythological narratives that were present in ancient Egypt. Yes, it is. And it's the fact that things change the whole time. It doesn't stay static. If you like to say families of the gods,

They evolve as time goes by. So if you take a character like Thoth, who is a fairly innocuous god, he's a lunar god. Lunar gods tend to be... God of the moon, is he? Yes, yes. So like a solar god, a god of the sun is quite fiery and quite active. A lunar god...

Well, they're good accountants and they're good record keepers. I say that I used to be an accountant. I'm not dissing accountants. I have great respect for accountants. Well, they're not, you know, you want them on your side, but in an administrative role rather than, you know, a defending role. But in the beginning, though, at the beginning of the dynastic age, we can read about him in the pyramid text. And he's quite a fiery person. And he goes about, he's active and not always good.

So you can see that even someone as quiet as Thoth evolves, his character evolves. Some characters go the other way. Seth is always a complicated character, but by the end of the dynastic period, he's basically the equivalent of Satan. He's the devil. He's someone that you wouldn't really admire, but that's because of classical influences coming in. He's been influenced by that. So again, he's evolved dramatically.

We have to remember that it's not just knowing the story, it's the story that was told in a certain place at a certain time. Also remember that although it kind of defeats logic that we're taught that you can only have one creation,

The Egyptians are happy to choose from several, and they can accept that they believe one thing but other people believe something else, and that is absolutely fine. And they accept that there's not, let's say, kings and pharaohs trying to enforce their one belief or their one version of a particular mythological narrative. You said all these different versions are welcome in different parts of Egypt at different times. Yes, as far as we can see. It seems that local gods grew increasingly powerful, and some grew into state gods with big temples, and some just stayed powerful but locally.

Kings would have a duty because they were the one human being technically who could communicate properly with the gods and the people. They were like a conduit that everything flowed through. So they had to be the high priest of every cult. Technically, they were the only people who could make the offerings because they were the only people that the gods were able to hear.

But actually, they had deputies who worked for them. They had to have priests to do the offerings because they couldn't do it. There weren't enough hours in the day for them to do it. So kings had a duty, really, to support all the gods. And they might favour one, but they would try to support all the gods because they had this idea of mart, which is a concept that comes up time and time in ancient Egypt.

which is as rightness and status quo. We don't have a word for it. We have a word for the opposite. The opposite is isfet, it means chaos. So it's sort of, mart is anti-chaos. And king's duty is to maintain mart, make sure everything as it should be, and to offer mart to the gods. The gods want Egypt to have this state of mart.

and they will in return reward the king and reward Egypt. So it's sensible and safe for the king to worship all the gods. We only get one king, that's Akhenaten, who for a very brief period of time

favours one god, that's not so bad that he favours it, it's that he ignores or turns his back on other gods and that is potentially very dangerous for Egypt because there's a potential of upsetting Mart and the gods who've been displaced getting very angry. It's not just a theological problem but it actually could have become a real problem for Egypt but it only lasted for, well he was on the throne for 17 years and it carried on just the beginning of Tutankhamen's reign so maybe 20 years at the most and they put everything back how it had been.

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Offer valid for a limited time. Other fees and terms apply. And now, as we delve into the myths and legends that shaped ancient Egypt, the best place to start is the beginning. You've already mentioned the creation story. And we started this episode with a retelling of the traditional creation story about the birth of the Egyptian Enead. Am I saying that right? Yes, yes. Nine gods. Nine gods. So Enead, so that does come from the ancient Greek for nine, I'm guessing. Yes, yes.

But you have to remember that this is a story that evolved throughout the dynastic age. So if you were

Thinking about the creation of the world at the beginning of the dynastic age, you wouldn't have this fully formed Aeneid of nine gods. This gradually comes in. But the story itself is a very simple one. So what is the story? Well, the story is that at the beginning of time, there's nothing apart from water. Ah, primordial water. Yes. There's no light. There's no time. Nothing. And then in the water, there's an egg.

Oh, okay. And the egg, this egg will eventually cracks open and with a big surge, a mound appears on the water. And on the mound is the god Aten. Because he's a god of sunlight, of sun, he brings his own light with him. So suddenly there's light and there's land.

And presumably time emerges at the same time. And eventually it's complicated and I'll go into more detail in a minute or two. He is able to populate this mound, first of all with gods and then with people. So this is the beginning of all things. It's very interesting because it seems to be very much based on the Egyptians' own experience of life because they live in a land which is very,

centered, well not centered, it runs alongside parallel to the River Nile, which runs through the center of Egypt and then empties into the Mediterranean Sea. And every year the River Nile floods and then the floodwaters recede. And as the floodwaters recede, the land that's been flooded comes up in the form of mounds out of the water.

So they very much connect floods. In other mythologies, floods are bad things, aren't they? Yes. But in Egypt, they're not. Floods and water is a good thing. So the idea of land coming out of water is something that would have been very familiar to the Egyptians. And it also seems to reflect the idea of almost pyramids.

coming out of the desert later on, obviously, because they're later. Also, if you think of graves, we tend to have a mound on top of a grave. Yeah, tumulus. Yeah, so any sort of mound like that is very significant to the Egyptians. So it's a story that fits very nicely into their life experiences, and it explains where they come from, which is something that most people want to...

And I guess it makes so much sense, doesn't it, given how important, how vital the river Nile is to ancient Egyptian civilization, that they almost want to kind of tie that in to their whole creation belief. Yes. I think it's not so much that they want to, but I know what you mean. I'm being a bit picky here. It's that they can't envisage anything else. They struggle to imagine a land that isn't based on a river.

To the extent, and also the river has to flow northwards into the Mediterranean. So when they go to the Near East and they find rivers that flow in the opposite direction, they think the river's flowing the wrong way and they describe it as the rivers are flowing the wrong way. When they imagine the afterlife, they imagine it with a river. It's exactly like Egypt. They're so tied to this idea that they find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a land that doesn't operate in the same way.

Well, let's kind of keep going on with this story. So you have Artem who emerges from this egg. And if it's the Enead, so nine, as we've already hinted at there. So you've already talked about Artem. So who are these other gods and how do we all get these other gods at the beginning? Well, Artem...

is lonely, so decides to have children, which he generates himself. There are various ways explained for this, quite graphically explained. This is one of the things the Egyptians are farmers. They're not shy about talking about sex in any way, shape or form. Some of the illustrations that demonstrated them this really shocked the Victorians who found them. But yes, so he either masturbates or he coughs or he sneezes, whatever. He produces these children who come out of his body.

And they are called Shu and Tefnut. They are twins. They will eventually marry each other. They have to. There's nobody else around. They will have children of their own. They're called Geb and Nut. So we have the four gods plus Artem. And Shu is the god of the atmosphere. Tefnut is the goddess of moisture.

And then we get more tangible, Geb, the sun, is the earth god, which is interesting because in many, many societies, the earth is female. But in Egypt, the earth is male. And Nut, his sister wife to Geb, is the sky god.

They marry and produce children, but they quarrel and they have to be separated. So Shu, the atmosphere, separates Geb, the earth, from the sky by literally standing between them and forcing them apart. And that gives you sort of the cosmos in a way, that you've got the overarching... Her body is arched over his.

And it's the pathway. She's an edge. She's not a solid barrier. She's an edge. Her body is the pathway that the sun and the moon and the stars will go along. Then beneath her, you have the atmosphere. And then underneath that, you have Geb, the earth. What you don't have in the story, but we can imagine is there is underneath him, maybe a form of the underworld.

with the tombs dug into it and maybe even Tefnut in some way connected so that it mirrors because we've got Shu supporting Nut but maybe Tefnut is also underneath Geb we don't know we don't know about that

But it sort of sets out the whole cosmos for us. So we've got five gods there. And they're all very elemental gods, aren't they, in what they represent? I mean, this is like goddesses of love or anything at that time. This is very much the core elements that are needed to create the world. Yes. So you've got light and you've got moisture and you've got atmosphere and you've got earth and you've got sky.

These four then go on to have four... Well, they have children. Actually, it's an interesting story. And Newt, their mother, swallows the children.

Okay, interesting. And Geb doesn't like this. And this is why they quarrel. And this is why Shu has to separate the two of them. So they've had those children. But after this, they have more children. They have four children. And they are Isis and Osiris and Seth and Nephthys. Ah, those are more recognisable names. They are, yes. Those are the ones people have heard of. And they are far more human-like. They aren't Earth and Sky and so on. They're more like human beings who behave differently.

behave in a very human-like manner given that they're deities. And Osiris is king

of Egypt and Isis is his queen. So we've got the first king and queen there. And Seth and Nephthys are the brother and sister of those two. And that's the basic nine gods. And is this version of the story or that outline of the story, has this all been ascertained from evidence from Heliopolis that you highlighted earlier? I mean, what type of sources do we have for this story particularly? All over the place and all throughout Egypt as well. We're finding it from funerary archaeology. We're finding it from

What we don't have is a written down full account of this story though, dating to ancient Egypt. What we have for that is sort of later references that tell us about it. But within Egypt, we're picking it up from art as well, you know, images of these things happening. It's just bits of evidence pieced together that we know that this happened. So we now have the full nine deities, that's the story. But Joyce, where do humans fit into all of this?

That's an interesting question because, again, in many religions or mythologies, when they talk about creation, it all builds up the creations of people. That's the important bit of it. In this one, there's a sort of sub-story that when Artem is on the island with

his children, they fall into the water, the waters of Nun which is surrounding them. And the waters of Nun are chaotic. I've already mentioned Mart and chaos. They are chaotic, the waters. It's a very bad thing. So he's distraught and he starts to cry and he pulls out his eye and he sends his eye to look for the twins who've fallen in the water. And the eye brings them back to him

and obviously rescued and they're still alive and his tears of worrying and sorrow turned to tears of happiness and from those tears come the people so there is sort of byproduct they're not he didn't set out to make them but that's where they came from in this version of the story they're a byproduct they're not the final end product unlike in other myth stories no no they're just incidental wow it's the story of the gods it's not the story of the people entirely

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I mean, what's the next step? Because I hear that rebirth is a very important concept in ancient Egyptian mythology. And how is this linked to this creation story? Well, it is an important concept because of course we're picking a lot of this up from tombs. So it will be. But I think here you're thinking of the goddess Nut who is stretched over the earth. She's very important because every day she gives birth to the sun and at night she swallows the sun and it passes through the body and

and is reborn again. We find Nut also inside coffins, painted obviously, so that she can protect the dead as they go into the next world as well. And Isis as well will actually have a protective role over the dead in the future as well. So even though it's a creation story, these are people who will feature later. Osiris will also feature in the story of resurrection. So

Yes, they're connected with the creation of the world, but they're also going to go on to have their own separate stories and do separate things. Yes, this is only the beginning, and we'll get to the Osiris myth in a later episode, absolutely, because it is so well-known, isn't it? But also one thing there which is important with the creation is you say there's almost kind of a lineage. Artem at the start, then his two children, then their children, and so on, then you get the nine. Are there then further attempts, if this is just the beginning of creation,

More from these nine trying to have more children. I mean, is there another part, almost more layers to this story and more importance? There can be very, very many different layers. It depends who you are and where you are. What seems to actually be happening? Because of course, these aren't real people. And we have to keep reminding ourselves of this. These are stories that are taken.

made up to take gods who were already existing. So I think I said that at the end of the pre-dynastic period, you're in a situation where probably there were local gods from different places and some would become more important than others. And as some gods became more important than others, local priests were trying to attach their god to a mythology that was becoming more successful. So you would find

people being latched onto the basic stories. So the basic story would first of all be probably the creation of the world, and then you get Isis and Osiris that sort of latched onto that story. We get all sorts of stories about children born to Isis and Osiris and Seth, and they contradict each other because people in different places would have believed different things. So you get a story that Isis and Osiris are the parents of the god Horus, but you can also believe, if you want to, that Hathor is the parent of the god Horus.

There's the story that Osiris and Nephthys are the parents of the god Anubis, but you can also believe if you want to that Isis is the mother of Anubis or that Anubis comes from somewhere completely separately. And it's interesting to see that if you have a successful god but you want to boost their success, you will try and latch them on as a sort of supporting act to a more successful god. So we have these evolving mythologies in local temples all over the place.

And it's probably a bit random as to which form of which story survives for us to know it. We should never think we have the definitive version of the myth because we don't. We have one version of the myth and there are probably lots of others on very similar lines

It's difficult to give parallels, but people have different understandings of Christmas in different houses. Many people in the UK celebrate Christmas, but they celebrate it in different ways for different purposes. And it's the same sort of thing. And that is similar in Greek mythology as well. There is not one definitive version. As you say, there is just the version that is most popular today. And there are many different versions. Yes, and it's us that's made it popular. It's not the Egyptians, it's us. But having said that, these are very,

important gods that we talked about. They will last from the beginning of the dynastic age right to its end and in some cases beyond that as well. And one other really recognisable god that I really would like to focus on is one of my personal favourites is the god Thoth because he will kind of explain who he is but I'd also like to kind of

Keeping on children, this linked to a particular story of Geb and Nut in their struggle to have children. And Thoth plays a key role in that too. What's this? Yes, that's a bit of an odd story. Thoth is a lunar god. That means he's connected to the moon. And lunar gods tend to be very quiet people. They're accountants and scribes and so on. They don't go out and fight. Was he part of the Aeneid or is he added later? No, he's not. No.

And he's not part of their family group. He seems to... Well, we don't really know where he comes from. There's various stories as to where he comes from, but we don't really know. But he's there from the beginning. He's there in the pyramid text. But the pyramid text, which are the texts that were put inside pyramids...

Not from the very beginning, but from the fifth dynasty. After that point, they were inside all the kings and queens pyramids, but not all the texts. There's about just under a thousand sayings, spells, we call them, or utterances. And they tell the story of the king ascending into the heavens after death, but not every king would have every text in it. They would have an assortment. So what we have to do from those is look at everything in all the pyramids and try and sort them out.

to see the complete story. Anyway, he's there, but he's quite an aggressive person in the beginning and he really mellows and becomes this sort of scribe and accountant, but he's not a fierce warrior type god. And the story is that Gebennut couldn't have children. There were 360 days in the year and Thoth invented the extra five days or added in the extra five days during which they could have children.

And that's how they're able to have children. But again, that's a very peripheral later part of the myth, but it's obviously what's important to somebody.

And it's actually really important and interesting because the priests in all the temples were timekeepers because they had to know when they were going to do the rituals. So they had to keep an eye on the time, particularly the ones associated with solar sun gods and lunar or moon gods because they needed to track time. They would, and this particularly was appropriate to solar temples, that they would divide the night into 12 hours and the day into 12 hours.

But because night and day aren't always equal in length, sometimes the night will be shorter and the day will be longer. The hours could be varying length, but there would always be 12 of them in each aspect. This was done by the priests. So it's true that time and dates and so on and calendars, they derive from the priesthood and it was an important aspect of it. What they didn't do was to put in the leap year.

So gradually, gradually, the calendar gets completely out of sync. And then eventually it will come back into sync again and then go out of sync again. No, it's interesting, like fixed calendars, you get to the time of Julius Caesar when the Julian reforms. But it's interesting learning about time and calendar and how they believed. And of course, something like ancient Egyptian society, agriculture, important with the flood seasons and all that. It's important to everyday people as well. So you can understand why there is a myth

associated with the Aeneid, with the origins of mythology being linked to time and the calendar and all of that, can't you? Yes. And also an awareness of wanting children, not being able to have them. It makes the gods seem quite human in a way. Gradually, the first gods don't seem particularly human-like. And by the time we get lower down the Aeneid, they are becoming much more human-like in what they do and how they think and how they behave. Yeah.

As we start to wrap up this first episode, focusing on the creation and the Aeneid, it feels like we've covered the basic elements of that story. But as you've highlighted right at the beginning, in different parts of Egypt, in different cults, were there, I'm presuming as you kind of highlighted, other origins, stories associated with particular gods and goddesses, depending where you were in Egypt?

Yes. There's one that's fairly similar that comes from Ashmanane. That's the modern name of it. Hermopolis Magna is what, well, it was known as the Greek period, actually, but we tend to call it Hermopolis Magna. Very similar in that it involves water. But in the water this time, there are actually some beings. There are four brog-like gods and four snake-headed goddesses. Again, out of the water, a mound appears.

And on the mound, there might be a goose who lays an egg, or there might be a bird that settles on the mound, or there might be a flower that opens on the mound, or there might even be a flower that opens in the water without the mound. So it's a very similar story. Out of this comes the sun god.

Very similar story, but not quite the same. We don't have the nine. Instead, we have the four and four at the beginning. The eight of Hermonopolis. We have eight there. Yes, but very different if we went further south towards Aswan. We have the story of Knum, who's a potter, and he creates people on his potter's wheel.

So a very practical way of making people, although it has to be quite a late dating myth because the potter's wheel doesn't come in at the beginning of the dynastic period. It's slightly later than that. If we go to Memphis, which was for a long time the major capital city of Egypt, back north again,

where modern Cairo is really. We find the god Tar, and he's really interested. This is associated with the bull, isn't he? He can be, yes, yes, associated with the bull. But he's also a craftsman. He's a craftsman god. And he's a metal worker, so he's been able to build things out of metal. But he also is able to create. And without having to have a sort of sexual creation, like Atum has a sexual creation, although he does it himself.

and the frogs and the snake-headed goddesses at Hermopolis Magna, they're male and female, so they're sexually differentiated, ties by himself, but he creates by thought and by his heart because the heart is the organ of thinking. So it's much more actually a sophisticated way of creation.

that you're not doing it physically. It's a much more complicated, if you think about it, way of creating people. So he does it that way. Those are the major ones we know of, but there's probably a whole lot more as well that we don't talk about. Last question before we completely wrap up. Of course, in ancient Greek mythology, you have near the earlier stages of the creation of the gods and goddesses, the early myth,

You have stories like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, bringing fire to humans, and then this difficult relationship between humans and the gods. And of course, you get the flood myth in Mesopotamia and in Christianity. Are there any stories in ancient mythology that we know of or hints of stories where these early gods and humans, they have quite a turbulent relationship almost?

It's quite interesting that the Egyptian gods, on the whole, don't have much to do with humans. They don't tend to fall in love with them. You will occasionally get a god falling in love with the queen.

and will then become the father of the next king. That happens in New Kingdom stories. But they don't have a great deal to do with humans compared to the gods in many other countries. So they're keeping separate most of the time. I mean, Joyce, you've given us a great taster, an introduction to the story of the Egyptian gods and goddesses. And we will see you very soon for when you next feature in this miniseries. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Joyce Tildesley kicking off our new mini-series about the ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and are looking forward to future installments in the weeks ahead as we explore more of the mystery behind these various deities.

The script for the story at the beginning of the episode, it was written by Andrew Hulse and narrated by Mene Elbezawi. The episode was produced by Anne-Marie Luff and Joseph Knight, our ancient producers, and it was edited by our editor Aidan Lonergan. Thank you to you all for making this episode a reality.

Now, last thing from me, thank you once again for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. And don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. And as a special gift,

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