Benben Stone

Also Known As: Egyptian bnbn; also Benben, Ben-ben; the capstone form is the benbenet
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: The Benben is the first solid thing in the Egyptian world, the mound that rose out of the primordial water and the sacred stone at Heliopolis that stood for it.
Role in Mythos: It is the place where the creator Atum first stood and brought the gods into being, and the model for every pyramid capstone and obelisk tip raised after it.
Relation to Humans: The stone was kept in the temple of the sun at Heliopolis, where the first light of each morning was said to fall on it. Kings copied its shape for the tops of their pyramids and obelisks so that their own monuments would catch the same light.

Before there is anything else there is water. It has no surface and no shore, it is dark all the way down, and it does not move. The Egyptians called it Nun. Then something hard breaks through from below, a hump of ground with the wet still running off it, and for the first time there is a place to stand.

That first ground is the Benben. In the account of creation told at Heliopolis, the old city of the sun on the edge of the Nile Delta, the god Atum came into being on that mound, alone, with nothing around him but water. From where he stood he produced the first pair of gods, Shu and Tefnut, air and moisture, and from them came the earth, the sky and everyone else. The oldest surviving version is carved on the walls inside royal pyramids of the Old Kingdom, more than four thousand years ago. It addresses the creator as Atum-Khepri and tells him: “you rose up as the benben in the Mansion of the Bennu in Heliopolis.” It adds that he spat out Shu and Tefnut and put his arms around them. In those lines the god and the mound are hard to tell apart. Atum does not climb onto the hill. He is the hill.

The mound had a stone to stand for it. In the temple at Heliopolis, in a sanctuary called the Mansion of the Benben, the priests kept a sacred stone that carried the same name, and the tradition held that the first rays of the rising sun fell on it each morning. The scene is easy enough to set. The courts are still cold and blue, the river mist has not lifted, and then the light comes over the eastern desert and the top of the stone turns gold while everything below it is still in shadow. The world begins again, on schedule, as it did the first time.

Nobody knows what it looked like.

The temple is gone, the stone is gone, and no carving that certainly shows the original has been found. What survives are the copies, and they disagree. One tradition draws the Benben as a pointed, pyramid-shaped stone. Another gives it a rounded top, like a short thick pillar. The sun temples built by kings of the Fifth Dynasty, which seem to have imitated the great temple at Heliopolis on a smaller scale, were centred on a stout, stubby obelisk set on a platform, and that may be the closest thing to a portrait that exists.

The name itself seems to be part of a chain of sounds that pleased the priests. The sun’s rising is weben. The stone it rises on is the benben. The bird that perches there is the bennu, the grey heron of Heliopolis that the Greeks later heard about and turned into the phoenix. Sun, stone and bird were tied together by something close to a pun, which is not the weakest foundation a theology has ever had. The bennu was said to live on the Benben, or else in a sacred willow nearby, and its cry at the first dawn was the first sound.

Once the shape was holy it spread. The capstone of a pyramid was called a benbenet, a little benben, and the pointed tip of an obelisk carried the same idea up into the sky on a granite shaft. A pyramid is, among other things, a very large stand for holding a copy of the first mound up to the morning. One of those capstones can still be looked at. In 1900 inspectors sent to Dahshur noticed a grey block sticking out of the sand on the east side of the ruined pyramid of Amenemhat III, a king of the Twelfth Dynasty. It turned out to be the pyramid’s own tip: polished dark basalt, about a metre and forty high and nearly two metres across the base, some four and a half tonnes of it. On the east face a winged sun disc spreads over a pair of carved eyes, placed so that the dead king could look out at the sunrise, and the lines of text below ask the sun god to take his spirit up into the sky. It stands in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, smooth and cool to the hand, at eye level for the first time in its life.

The idea was strong enough to survive a revolution. When the young king later called Akhenaten began building for his single sun god, the Aten, at Karnak, one of the new temples was named the Mansion of the Benben. He set it beside an obelisk already standing there. On its surviving blocks the king does not appear at all. The figure making the offerings to the sun is his queen, Nefertiti, with their eldest daughter behind her. After his death the whole building was pulled apart and its blocks reused as rubble.

What the Benben does, in every form, is mark a beginning. It is the fixed point in the water, the spot where order first had something to stand on, and the place the creator’s own power settled. Set on top of a tomb, it was meant to pass that power on, so that a dead king lying under a copy of the first mound would rise from it as the sun did. It drew the light down each dawn and sent life up.

Its limits are those of stone. It works only as long as the sun strikes it, and for the hours of the night it is one more dark shape among others. It can be copied, and it was, hundreds of times, but a copy can be stripped of its gold, toppled, or buried in sand for four thousand years. The original could be lost entirely, and it was. Heliopolis lies under the northeastern suburbs of Cairo now, and a single obelisk stands there to show where the temple was. The first place in the world has no known address.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Benben Stone?

The Benben is the first mound of earth that rose out of the primordial waters in the Egyptian creation story told at Heliopolis. The Benben Stone was a sacred stone kept in the sun temple at Heliopolis to represent that mound. The creator god Atum was said to have stood on it, or risen as it, when he made the first gods.

What did the Benben Stone look like?

Nobody knows exactly what the Benben Stone looked like, because the original is lost and no certain picture of it has been found. Egyptian copies show it in two ways, as a pointed pyramid-shaped stone and as a short pillar with a rounded top. The squat obelisks in the sun temples of the Fifth Dynasty may be the closest imitation.

How is the Benben connected to the pyramids?

The capstone at the top of an Egyptian pyramid was called a benbenet and was modelled on the Benben. The pointed tips of obelisks carried the same meaning. A surviving example is the basalt capstone of the pyramid of Amenemhat III, found at Dahshur in 1900 and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

What is the link between the Benben and the Bennu bird?

The Bennu bird, a sacred heron of Heliopolis, was said to live on the Benben Stone or in a sacred willow nearby. The Egyptian words for the rising of the sun, the stone and the bird sound alike: weben, benben and bennu. The Bennu later inspired the Greek phoenix.

Where is the Benben Stone now?

The original Benben Stone is lost. The temple at Heliopolis that held it has disappeared, and the site now lies under the northeastern suburbs of Cairo, where one obelisk still stands. Only copies survive, such as pyramid capstones and obelisks.