Dedun

Also Known As: also Dedwen, Dedoun; Egyptian Ddwn; in the late Kushite period joined with Osiris as Osiris-Dedwen
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Nubian Mythology, Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Dedun is the god who stands at the head of Nubia and carries its incense, the scent that the gods themselves burn.
Role in Mythos: He is the divine face of the land south of Egypt, the one who brings its perfume to the dead king and whose favour a pharaoh claimed in order to rule there.
Relation to Humans: Egyptian kings who conquered Nubia called themselves his beloved and built him temples at their frontier forts. Centuries later the kings of Kush gave him a temple of their own at Jebel Barkal, joined with Osiris.

Smoke climbs inside a pyramid that has been sealed for four thousand years. It is only written smoke, cut into the limestone of a royal burial chamber, but the words are specific about where it comes from. The dead king, they say, carries the scent of Dedun on his body. Dedun is the youth of the south who has come out of Nubia, and he has brought the king the incense with which the gods perfume themselves.

That is his first appearance anywhere, in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest body of religious writing Egypt left behind, carved around 2400 BCE. He arrives fully formed and already useful. There is no account of his birth, no parents, no wife, no child. The spell does not explain him. It assumes the listener knows that the best incense comes up the river from the south, and that the south has a god.

Incense was not a small thing. The resin burned in every temple in Egypt, morning and evening, a sweet heavy smoke that clung to linen and hair, and none of it grew at home. It came north through Nubia in sacks and jars, expensive at every step. A priest tipping a pellet onto the coals of a bronze burner, watching it soften and catch and thread upward toward a painted ceiling, was handling a Nubian product whether he thought about it or not. Dedun is that journey given a name. He is the god at the far end of the trade.

Egypt did not leave the far end alone. In the Twelfth Dynasty, about 1870 BCE, King Senusret III pushed his border south to the Second Cataract and pinned it there with a chain of mudbrick fortresses above the rapids, the largest of them at Semna. He was a conqueror and did not pretend otherwise. He also took the local god with him into his own titles. A red granite offering table from the cataract, cut with the king’s names around the sign for offering, calls him beloved of Dedun, foremost of Nubia, lord of the Land of the Bow. The Land of the Bow was Egypt’s name for Nubia, a country of famous archers. The stone is blunt about the arrangement. The king holds the land because the land’s god loves him.

Four hundred years on, Thutmose III rebuilt the temple at Semna in sandstone and dedicated it to two beings: Dedun, and Senusret III himself, who by then was worshipped on that frontier as a god. On its walls Dedun stands and receives offerings beside the dead conqueror, the two of them sharing a house. The carvers gave him no special shape. He is a man, drawn as Egyptian gods are drawn, upright and calm. Whatever he looked like to the people who first prayed to him was not recorded, and Egyptian chisels did not ask.

Nobody wrote down what Nubians said about him. That is the hard fact of his record. Every early word about Dedun was written by Egyptians, for Egyptian purposes, and the people whose god he was left no texts of their own from those centuries. So there is no myth. He fights no monster and wins no throne. He has a place, a product, and a title.

He outlasted the empire that borrowed him. When Nubia had its own kings, the rulers of Kush, they built on the sacred mountain of Jebel Barkal, and in the seventh century BCE King Atlanersa began a temple there for a joined god, Osiris-Dedwen. The old lord of the south had been paired with the lord of the dead. It suited him. He had begun, after all, at a king’s burial with incense in his hands. The temple at Semna survived too, though not where it stood. It was taken apart block by block before the Nile was dammed and the cataract drowned, and rebuilt in the garden of the national museum in Khartoum.

What Dedun can do is narrow and old. He owns the south and what comes out of it. He can make a dead king smell like a god, which in Egyptian thinking was most of the way to being one. He can make a foreign ruler legitimate on Nubian ground, and later make a Nubian ruler at home with Osiris. His limits are the limits of a god known through other people’s records. He never moved north; no temple of his is known inside Egypt proper, below the First Cataract. He has no voice in any surviving story. And his worship always sat in someone else’s building, first a pharaoh’s fort and then a temple he shared.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dedun?

Dedun, also spelled Dedwen, is an ancient Nubian god known from Egyptian records. He is called foremost of Nubia and is linked with the incense that came to Egypt from the south. He first appears in the Pyramid Texts, around 2400 BCE.

What is Dedun the god of?

Dedun is the god of Nubia and of its incense. In the Pyramid Texts he is the youth from Nubia who brings the dead king the incense the gods use, so that the king carries the scent of Dedun. Egyptian kings also treated him as the god whose favour gave them the right to rule Nubia.

Where was Dedun worshipped?

Dedun was worshipped in Nubia, not in Egypt proper. Senusret III honoured him at the fortress of Semna on the Second Cataract, and Thutmose III later built a temple there dedicated to Dedun and to the deified Senusret III. In the seventh century BCE the Kushite king Atlanersa began a temple to Osiris-Dedwen at Jebel Barkal.

What does Dedun look like?

Dedun is shown as a man in the usual form of an Egyptian god on the walls of the temple at Semna. Nothing in the carving marks him as Nubian. No record survives of how the Nubians themselves pictured him.

Are there any myths about Dedun?

No myth about Dedun survives. All the early evidence was written by Egyptians, and it gives him a land, a title and a role with incense, but no story, no parents and no family. The Nubians who worshipped him left no texts about him from that time.