Who Was Ra, the Egyptian Sun God?
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Ra, the Egyptian sun god, sailed across the sky each day in a boat and fought his way through the underworld each night. That single image explains an enormous amount about Egyptian mythology, because the sunrise was not taken for granted. It had to be won again every night.
Ra's place in the order of things
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.
The daily journey
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.
Ra and the other gods
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
The story of Ra growing old
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.
Ra and the pharaohs
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.
The takeaway
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.