Atum, Ra, and the Emergence from the Waters of Nun

In the most influential of the Egyptian creation myths, the world began with a single act of emergence: a being called Atum rose from the primordial waters of Nun and, by his own power, brought forth everything that exists. The story is preserved in the religious literature of Heliopolis, the cult center that gave the Ennead its name, and it shaped how the Egyptians imagined creation for the next two and a half thousand years.

The myth of Atum is also where the Egyptian tradition most clearly identifies its creator with the sun. The fusion of Atum with Ra — Atum-Ra, the great sun god — made the daily sunrise a repetition of the first creation, and gave the entire Egyptian worldview a strong solar character.

The Waters of Nun

The Egyptians lived in a country whose existence depended on water. Each year the Nile rose and fell, depositing fresh silt on the fields, sustaining crops, and isolating communities on patches of high ground. It is no accident that the Egyptians imagined the original condition of the world as an infinite body of water.

This water was called Nun. In the Heliopolitan theology, Nun was the passive, undifferentiated source of all things. It was not itself a god, although it was sometimes described as a divine entity. It had no qualities, no form, no movement. It was the condition out of which qualities, forms, and movement emerged.

In temple reliefs, Nun is depicted as a bearded man holding a solar barque, or as a great serpent or tortoise. The names of the four pairs of Ogdoad gods of Hermopolis — Nun and Naunet, Heh and Hauhet, Kek and Kauket, Amun and Amaunet — describe the qualities of this pre-creation state: water, infinity, darkness, and hiddenness.

The Emergence of Atum

According to the myth, Atum emerged from Nun by his own will. The act is sometimes described as self-generation, sometimes as emergence onto the benben — the primordial mound, the first dry land — and sometimes as the spontaneous appearance of the sun. Each of these images captures a different aspect of the same idea: that the world began when something definite came out of something indefinite. The episode is described most famously in Coffin Text Spell 80 (c. 2100 BCE), which the Egyptologist Stephen Quirke translates as Atum masturbating or spitting out Shu and Tefnut (The Coffin Texts, 2004).

Several texts describe the act in unusually frank physical terms. The Coffin Texts speak of Atum as having “evolved” through self-copulation, or through spitting or masturbation. The point of these images is not erotic; it is the idea of self-sufficiency. Atum needed nothing and no one to begin creation. He was his own origin. Erik Hornung (Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, 1982) is right that the Egyptians were not being crudely literal here — these are stylized statements about divine autonomy.

The Pyramid Texts describe Atum as “the one who came into being by himself,” the original being from whom all others descended. The text often associated with this idea, sometimes called the Cannibal Hymn (Pyramid Texts Utterances 273–274, from the pyramid of Unas, last king of the 5th Dynasty, d. c. 2345 BCE), describes Atum as having created the gods, “devoured” them in the evening, and reborn them in the morning — a striking image in which the daily solar cycle is read as a continual act of creation. The Cannibal Hymn is one of the strangest pieces of funerary literature to survive from the Old Kingdom, and modern readers are still arguing about whether it should be read literally, symbolically, or as a kingly boast.

Atum and the Primordial Mound

The image of the primordial mound — the benben — is closely tied to Atum. In the Egyptian imagination, the world began when a small hill of earth appeared above the surface of the waters. This hill was the first dry land, and it was on this hill that Atum stood when he began to create.

The myth had a direct connection to the cult at Heliopolis. The principal temple of Ra at Heliopolis was said to have been built on the site of the original mound, and the benben — a pyramidal stone — was preserved within the temple as a cult object. The same benben is believed to have inspired the design of the obelisk, and from it the pyramidal form spread to tombs and to the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom. No image of the original benben has come down to us, and the descriptions we have vary widely — the surviving obelisks give us only the roughest idea.

The connection between the primordial mound and the sun god was reinforced daily. At sunrise, the rays of the rising sun appeared to touch the tip of the benben first, as if the god were still standing on the original hill. Temples aligned to the sunrise — including the Temple of Karnak — used this image to connect every morning’s ritual to the first morning of the world.

The Birth of Shu and Tefnut

From Atum came the first generation of gods. The myth names them as Shu and Tefnut — the god of air and the goddess of moisture. Their names describe the two basic physical elements without which no further creation was possible.

The act of their birth is described in several ways. In some versions, Atum coughed or spat them out. In others, he produced them through an act of masturbation, his semen falling on the ground and forming the first gods. In still others, he called them into being by their names. The variety of images is not contradictory; it represents the ancient Egyptian habit of seeing the same divine act from different angles.

Shu and Tefnut in turn produced Geb and Nut — the earth and the sky. Geb and Nut produced Osiris and Isis, Set, and Nephthys. This is the genealogy of the Ennead of Heliopolis, the divine family at the heart of the Heliopolitan tradition.

The Identification of Atum and Ra

Although Atum and Ra were originally distinct, they were already identified with each other in the Old Kingdom. The combined name Atum-Ra — sometimes written Ra-Atum — became the standard way of naming the supreme solar deity from the New Kingdom onward. In this form, Atum-Ra was the king of the gods, the creator of the world, and the daily source of light and life.

The identification made the sun a central theological subject. Each morning, Ra rose out of the darkness of the east, just as Atum had emerged from Nun. Each evening, Ra descended into the underworld, where he fought the forces of chaos. The deceased pharaoh, identified with Osiris, was also identified with Ra, and was thought to travel with the sun through the twelve hours of the night. This is the theological background to the journey of the soul and to the Book of the Dead as a whole.

The Lotus and the Solar Child

A separate but related myth, also Heliopolitan in origin, describes the sun as a child emerging from a lotus that grew out of the waters of Nun. The myth is preserved in vignettes on tomb walls and in the Book of the Dead, and it represents the sun as a vulnerable, infant deity — a child of the deep.

This image is sometimes associated with Nefertem, a god of the lotus and of perfumes, who was said to be a child of Ptah and Sekhmet at Memphis. The lotus myth and the benben myth are not the same story, but both express the same basic idea: the sun is born out of the water each morning, and the world began when the first sun rose out of the first waters.

Atum, the Sun, and the King

The connection between Atum, Ra, and the king was central to Egyptian political theology. Each pharaoh was identified with Horus in life and with Osiris in death. But the king’s soul was also identified with Ra — the solar component of the divine self — and at death the king was said to merge with Ra in the sky.

This is why the pyramids of the Old Kingdom, including the Great Pyramid of Khufu, were associated with the cult of Ra as well as with the cult of the deceased king. The pyramid’s shape evoked the benben, the primordial mound, and the king’s ascent to the sky was conceived as a return to the original act of creation.

Legacy of the Atum-Ra Myth

The myth of Atum’s emergence from Nun remained at the center of Egyptian religion for more than two millennia. It provided the Egyptians with a way of explaining why the world existed at all, why the sun rises and sets, why the Nile floods, and why kingship was a sacred institution. It also influenced later religious thought in the Mediterranean world, where the Hermetic and Gnostic traditions of late antiquity adapted the image of a creator emerging from primordial waters for their own purposes. If you read only one thing in English on the Heliopolitan theology specifically, I would say make it the relevant chapter in James P. Allen’s Middle Egyptian (3rd ed. 2014) — it is short, clear, and gets the older translations right in a way the older books don’t.

To study Atum, Ra, and Nun is to encounter the most fundamental stratum of Egyptian theology — the layer at which the world, the gods, and the order of nature all come into being at once.