Who Was Ra, the Egyptian Sun God?

Ra was the creator god in several Egyptian traditions and the ruler of the sky, the earth and the underworld. He is usually shown with the head of a falcon and a sun disc above it, often with a cobra coiled around the disc.

In Egyptian mythology the pharaoh was closely linked to Ra, described as the son of Ra, which tied royal authority directly to the sun. Great temple complexes were built around his worship, and other gods were often merged with him, most famously as Amun-Ra.

Ra travelled across the sky by day in a solar boat. At sunset he entered the underworld and sailed through its twelve hours of darkness, which corresponded to the twelve hours of night.

Each night he faced the serpent Apophis, a creature of chaos who tried to swallow the boat and stop the sun rising. Egyptian mythology treated this battle as genuinely uncertain, and rituals were performed to help Ra win. A cloudy dawn or an eclipse could be read as Apophis getting close.

Egyptian mythology was flexible about identity, and Ra was often combined with other deities to express different aspects:

• •Amun-Ra, joining the hidden god of Thebes with the visible sun
• •Ra-Horakhty, linking Ra with Horus of the horizon
• •Khepri, the scarab beetle form of the rising morning sun
• •Atum, the form of the setting evening sun

One striking myth has Ra growing old as a king on earth, with humans beginning to plot against him. He sends the goddess Sekhmet to punish them, and she is so violent that he has to trick her into stopping by flooding a field with red dyed beer she mistakes for blood.

Ra then withdraws to the sky on the back of the sky goddess. It is a strange, memorable story, and it shows that even the greatest Egyptian god was imagined as ageing and eventually stepping back.

The link between Ra and kingship shaped Egyptian architecture and politics for millennia. From the fifth dynasty onward, pharaohs used the title son of Ra as part of their formal name, making the sun god the source of royal legitimacy.

This had practical consequences. The priesthood of Ra at Heliopolis, and later of Amun-Ra at Thebes, accumulated enormous wealth and land. When Akhenaten tried to displace them by promoting the sun disc Aten alone, the reform collapsed after his death, and the speed of the reversal says a great deal about how much power the established priesthoods held.

Much of what is known about Ra's night voyage comes from texts painted on the walls of royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, near modern Luxor. The best known is often called the Amduat, meaning 'that which is in the underworld'. It divides the night into twelve sections, one for each hour, and shows the sun god's boat passing through gates, caverns and waterways filled with gods, spirits and dangers. The dead king hoped to join this journey and rise again with the sun each morning.

Architecture tells a similar story. Kings of the fifth dynasty built special sun temples, the remains of which survive at Abu Gurob near Abusir, with a large open courtyard and a squat obelisk at the centre. Obelisks in general were linked with the sun, their pointed tips often thought to catch its first rays. Because temples, tombs and texts come from different centuries, Egyptologists can compare them to see how ideas about Ra were expanded and combined over time rather than fixed once and forever.

One Egyptian myth shows Ra as powerful yet vulnerable in an unexpected way. Ra had many names, but his true, secret name gave him his power, and no other god knew it. The goddess Isis, wanting that power for herself and her son Horus, collected some of the ageing god's saliva that had fallen to the ground. She mixed it with earth and shaped a serpent, then left it on the path where Ra walked each day. The snake bit him, and its poison was something even Ra could not cure.

In agony, Ra called the gods together for help. Isis offered to heal him, but only if he told her his secret name. He tried listing many of his other names first, but the pain did not stop. In the end he agreed to let his name pass to her, and she spoke the words that drove the poison out. The story was used in healing spells against scorpion and snake bites, which shows how a myth about the gods could also have a practical use in everyday life.

Heliopolis, the main centre of sun worship near modern Cairo, had its own account of creation. In the beginning there was only Nun, a dark, endless expanse of still water. From it rose a mound of land, and on that mound the creator Atum, often joined with Ra as Ra-Atum, came into being. He produced the first pair of gods, Shu, the air, and Tefnut, moisture. They in turn produced Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky, whose children were Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys. These nine gods together were known as the Ennead of Heliopolis.

The first mound had a physical symbol at Heliopolis, a sacred stone called the benben. Many Egyptologists think its shape inspired the pointed capstones placed on pyramids and obelisks. The temple was also linked with the benu, a heron-like bird associated with the sun's daily rebirth. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, reported that the people of Heliopolis told of a bird called the phoenix that visited only once every five hundred years. Many scholars see the benu as one source of the phoenix legend, which later grew into the story of a bird reborn from fire.

In 1954 the Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el-Mallakh opened a sealed pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid and found a full-sized boat, dismantled into more than a thousand pieces of cedar wood and carefully stacked. Reassembling it took a restorer, Hag Ahmed Youssef, many years of patient work, since there were no plans and the planks were held together with rope rather than nails. The finished vessel is about 43 metres long. In 2021 it was moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza, a delicate operation in itself.

The boat is often called a solar boat, as if it were made for the king to sail across the sky with Ra each day. That link is plausible, since texts describe the dead king joining the sun god's crew, and several boat pits surround the pyramid. But Egyptologists still debate its purpose. Some think it was a funeral barge used on the Nile during Khufu's burial, pointing to signs of wear that suggest it had been in water at least once. Others see it as a purely symbolic vessel for the afterlife. It may well have served both roles.

Ra, the Egyptian sun god, sailed the sky by day and fought chaos by night, and his daily victory was the model for order, kingship and renewal across Egyptian mythology.