Ra and the Sun Gods of Ancient Egypt

Of all the gods of ancient Egypt, the sun god was the most important. From the very beginning of Egyptian history, the people of the Nile watched the sun rise in the east, cross the sky, and set in the west, and they imagined that journey as the voyage of a god. The sun was the source of light, warmth, and life. It caused the crops to grow, drove away the darkness and the dangerous creatures that lived in it, and guaranteed the order of the world.

If you want a single book on the cult of Ra, the standard monograph is Stephen Quirke’s The Cult of Ra (2001). Quirke is sometimes a little dry in the early chapters, but his treatment of the New Kingdom theology is the one I go back to.

The Egyptians did not have a single sun god. They had several, Ra for the midday sun, Khepri for the rising sun, Atum for the setting sun, and Aten for the physical disk itself. Over time these gods merged with one another and with local deities, producing the great compound god Amun-Ra and, briefly, a true monotheism under Akhenaten.

This page introduces the sun gods, their myths, and the temples built in their honor. For a deeper dive into the nightly voyage, see Ra’s Nightly Journey Through the Duat.

Ra: The King of the Gods

Ra (Re) was the sun, the creator, and the king of the gods. His cult center was at Heliopolis (modern Cairo), and from the Old Kingdom onward, every pharaoh took a title that linked him to Ra: “Son of Ra.” Ra was so dominant in Egyptian religion that almost every other god was eventually identified with him.

Ra was usually shown as:

• A falcon perched on a standard
• A falcon-headed man with a sun disk encircled by a cobra on his head
• A man with a sun disk in the form of Ra-Horakhty (“Horus of the Two Horizons”)

Each morning, according to myth, Ra was born from the body of the sky goddess Nut. He sailed across the sky in a solar barque called the Mandjet (the Boat of Millions of Years). At night he entered the underworld in a second barque, the Mesektet, and fought the chaos serpent Apophis before being reborn at dawn.

The cult of Ra was maintained by a powerful priesthood at Heliopolis, but his worship was so widespread that he had sacred animals in many cities. The most important of these was the Mnevis bull, kept at Heliopolis as a living embodiment of the god.

Khepri: The Rising Sun

Khepri was the scarab beetle god who represented the rising sun. The Egyptians watched the scarab (Scarabaeus sacer) roll a ball of dung across the ground and lay its eggs in it, and from this they imagined that the beetle was self-created, just as the sun was self-created each morning. Khepri’s name is written with the scarab hieroglyph, and he was often shown as a man with a scarab for a head.

The scarab also became one of the most common amulets in Egyptian history. The Heart Scarab was placed over the heart of the mummy, with a spell from the Book of the Dead inscribed on it, to ensure that the heart would not testify against its owner in the judgement of the dead.

Atum: The Setting Sun and the Self-Created

Atum was the creator god of Heliopolis, the first being, who rose out of the primordial waters of Nun and produced the first pair of gods, Shu and Tefnut, by his own will. He was associated with the setting sun, the moment when the solar god grew old and dim.

Atum was usually shown as a man wearing the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt or, in his older form, as a snake or a lizard coiled around a divine egg. He was often merged with Ra as Atum-Ra, the complete sun god whose journey spanned the entire day.

The Aten: The Sun Disk

The Aten was the physical disk of the sun, considered in earlier times as a symbol of Ra. In the 14th century BCE, the pharaoh Akhenaten raised the Aten to the status of the only true god, in what is sometimes called the first monotheism in history. The new religion was centered at a new capital city called Akhetaten (modern Amarna), and the Aten was shown as a disk whose rays ended in human hands, blessing the king and queen.

Akhenaten’s revolution was not long-lived. Within a few years of his death, his son Tutankhamun, who may have been only eight or nine years old when he came to the throne, restored the old gods and abandoned Amarna. The Aten cult never completely disappeared, but it was no longer a state religion.

Amun-Ra: The King of the Gods of Thebes

The most powerful of the sun gods in the New Kingdom was Amun-Ra, the merger of Amun of Thebes with Ra of Heliopolis. Amun had been an obscure local god until the rise of the Theban dynasties in the Middle Kingdom, and the pharaohs of the New Kingdom transformed him into the supreme state god, lord of Karnak and father of the king.

Amun-Ra was worshipped in enormous temples, most famously the Temple of Karnak at Thebes, which was expanded by pharaoh after pharaoh for more than a thousand years. His wife Mut and his son Khonsu formed the Theban triad, with their own shrines within the Karnak complex.

Solar Temples

In the Old Kingdom, the kings of the Fifth Dynasty built a series of sun temples dedicated specifically to Ra. The best preserved of these is the sun temple of Niuserre at Abu Gurab, a large rectangular enclosure with a massive squat obelisk at one end. These temples were not tombs, they were places of daily ritual, where the king’s relationship to the sun was renewed.

By the New Kingdom, sun temples were no longer built as separate structures. The cult of Ra had been absorbed into the great state temples, particularly Karnak and Luxor, where the king was seen as the chief priest of Ra and the sun’s daily journey was celebrated in the festival calendar.

The Daily Voyage of the Sun

The Egyptians believed that the sun’s journey was a battle against chaos. Each day, Ra sailed across the sky in the Mandjet, bringing light and life to the world. Each night, he entered the underworld in the Mesektet and traveled through the twelve hours of the night, fighting the chaos serpent Apophis at the gates of each hour.

This nighttime voyage is described in the Amduat (literally “That Which Is in the Underworld”), a long text painted on the walls of royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The journey is the most detailed account of the Egyptian underworld that survives. To read more about it, see Ra’s Nightly Journey Through the Duat.

Sacred Animals of the Sun

Several animals were sacred to the sun gods:

• The falcon for Ra, Horus, and most solar gods
• The scarab beetle for Khepri
• The bull for the Mnevis of Heliopolis and the Buchis of Hermonthis
• The ram for several solar gods in Middle and New Kingdom Thebes
• The lion for several sun goddesses, including Sekhmet and Pakhet

The sacred bulls of Heliopolis were buried in vast catacombs at Saqqara, where archaeologists have found thousands of mummified bulls buried in stone sarcophagi.

The Sun and the King

The relationship between the sun god and the king was the most sacred bond in Egyptian religion. The pharaoh was the “Son of Ra,” and the sun god was believed to be the divine father of the royal line. The king’s journey after death was to join Ra in the solar barque, sailing through the underworld and emerging at dawn as a god himself.

This idea reached its peak in the architecture of the pyramids, which were designed as launching pads for the king’s ascent to the sun. The pyramid texts carved inside the pyramids contain dozens of spells to help the dead king join the solar barque and become a star. For more on this, see our guide to the pyramid texts and the afterlife.

The Sun in Egyptian Art and Symbolism

The sun disk is one of the most common symbols in Egyptian art. It appears:

• On the heads of gods and kings
• At the top of obelisks, the great stone monuments of the Egyptian temples
• In the name of the Aten, where the disk is shown with rays ending in hands
• In the Eye of Ra, a protective symbol paired with the Eye of Horus

The sun disk remains a powerful symbol of Egyptian religion today. To learn more, see our guide to Egyptian symbolism and to the sacred symbols of ancient Egypt.