Nun

Dig deep enough under any Egyptian temple and you reach water. The builders meant you to. Foundation trenches were sunk until the sides went dark and the workmen stood ankle-deep in cold seepage, because a temple was supposed to occupy ground that had risen out of a sea, and the sea had to be down there for the rising to mean anything. That water had a name. It was there before there was anything for it to be before.

The Egyptians did not picture the beginning as a storm. Nun is not a churning ocean with a surface and a horizon and weather; he has no top, no floor and no edge, and the one quality the texts return to again and again is that he does not move. His name was played against nni, a word for being tired, spent, inert. What lay before the world was not violence. It was an endless volume of dark, still water with nothing in it, and nothing happening, forever.

Somewhere in that flat blackness the creator lay unrealised, potential without form. Then land came up. A mound broke the surface, mud churned into shape, and on it the sun appeared for the first time. The tellings disagree about the shape it took, and they disagree loudly. At Heliopolis, Atum settled on the risen mound, the benben, and out of him came the first pair of gods. Elsewhere the sun rose from a lotus that had opened on the mound, or arrived as a heron, or a falcon, or a scarab beetle, or a naked child. In another account the great cow Mehet-Weret carried the sun disc between her horns and bore him out of the water. What every version keeps, whatever it changes, is the water it starts in.

At Hermopolis, a town the Egyptians called Khemenu, meaning Eight-Town, the pre-creation state was divided among eight gods rather than left as one. Four gods with the heads of frogs and four goddesses with the heads of snakes stood for the qualities of the deep: Nun and Naunet for the water, Kek and Kauket for the darkness, Heh and Hauhet for the endlessness, Amun and Amaunet for what is hidden. It is one of the more elegant pieces of thinking to survive from the ancient world, an attempt to describe nothing by breaking it into its components and giving each one a face.

Every morning he does the same work. The water parts, two arms come up out of it, and on the flat of his hands rides the boat of the sun with the scarab aboard and seven gods standing around it. The painters of the Twenty-first Dynasty put him in exactly that pose on the funerary papyrus of a chantress of Amun named Anhai, now in the British Museum: the god sunk to his chest in the primeval water, the solar barque held clear above him, the whole first morning happening again for the benefit of one woman’s afterlife. Creation was not a single event the Egyptians remembered. It was a thing that had to be redone at dawn, and it needed him underneath it.

He is also the flood. The inundation that came down the valley every summer, thick and brown and smelling of silt, was understood as his water rising through the earth, and the Nile itself was thought to well up from two holes in the ground where the deep leaked through. Rain counted too, since rain fell from a Nile in the sky. When the flood receded and the fields reappeared, the country watched the first mound come out of the water all over again, at field scale, once a year.

Nobody ever prayed to him.

The other end of the story is written in a spell for not dying a second time, a text known from only a handful of manuscripts, the fullest of them a papyrus from Memphis now in Leiden. In it Atum answers a question about how long any of this lasts, and the answer is millions of years and then nothing. The elders will be dispatched, everything made will be unmade, the earth will go back into the surging flood exactly as it was at the start. Two beings will remain, Atum and Osiris, and they will spend that second silence as serpents, unseen by anyone because there will be no one left to see. The ocean gets it all back.

His power is total and almost entirely passive. He cannot be exhausted, cannot be fought, cannot be bargained with, and holds the ordered world the way water holds a bubble, pressing on it from every side at once. Nothing in the Egyptian pantheon is older, and the Middle Kingdom onward called him father of the gods for that reason, older even than the creator who made everything else. What he does not have is will. He has no myth cycle of his own, no enemy, no wife in any sense that generates a story, no moment where he decides something. Apep at least attacks the sun; Nun only holds it up. The limitation is built into the name: the inert one cannot act, only be, and everything interesting that ever happened happened to something that came out of him rather than to him. When Egypt fell under foreign rule in the Late Period, the reading shifted and the darker face of that water came forward, the chaos side rather than the source side. The water had not changed. The people looking at it had.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nun in Egyptian mythology?

Nun is the personification of the primeval waters, the dark and motionless ocean that existed before creation. Everything in the Egyptian world came out of him, and from the Middle Kingdom onward he was called the father of the gods because he was older than the creator himself. His name is connected by wordplay to an Egyptian word for being tired or inert.

Did the ancient Egyptians worship Nun?

No temple was dedicated to Nun and no priesthood served him. He was a cosmic condition rather than a god who answered requests. Egyptians encountered his water in practical ways instead, through the annual Nile flood and through temple foundations that were deliberately dug down to the water table so the building would appear to rise out of the primeval sea.

What does Nun look like?

Nun is usually shown as a bearded man, often with blue-green skin, standing in water with his arms raised above his head to lift the boat of the sun. He sometimes wears a double plume. When he appears as one of the eight gods of Hermopolis he is given the head of a frog, while his female counterpart Naunet takes the head of a snake.

What is the Ogdoad, and what is Nun’s place in it?

The Ogdoad is the group of eight primordial deities associated with the town of Khemenu, or Hermopolis, whose Egyptian name means Eight-Town. They form four pairs standing for the qualities of the state before creation: Nun and Naunet for the water, Kek and Kauket for the darkness, Heh and Hauhet for endlessness, and Amun and Amaunet for hiddenness.

How does the world end in Egyptian mythology?

A spell for not dying a second time, preserved most fully on a papyrus from Memphis, has Atum declare that after millions of years everything he made will be undone and the earth will return to the primeval water in its original state. Only Atum and Osiris will remain, transformed into serpents. The ordered world is returned to Nun, who was there before it and outlasts it.

Related Entries

Atum, Ra, Amun-Re, Kek, Shu, Tefnut, Khepri, Bennu, Thoth, Nut, Osiris, Apep/Apophis, Hapi, Apsu, Tiamat