Nut

Lift the lid from an Egyptian coffin and there is a woman painted on the underside of it, upside down, running the whole length of the box. She is naked. She is dark, and covered in stars, and she was put there so that the moment the lid came down she would be face to face with the dead person inside, close enough that the resin-smelling air between them would have been no wider than a hand. Whoever commissioned that painting was buying a specific thing: the sky, brought indoors and sealed in with the body.

Her name is simply the word for sky. Nwt, written with a rounded pot balanced on top of the sign group, which is also the shape she wears on her head, and which some Egyptologists read as a womb. She belongs to the oldest layer of the record. The Pyramid Texts of the late Old Kingdom name her close to a hundred times, and by then her position in the family was already fixed. Atum brought himself into being. Atum produced Shu, who is air, and Tefnut, who is wet. Shu and Tefnut produced Nut and her brother Geb, and there the Egyptian scheme does something almost no other tradition does: it hands the sky to the daughter and the ground to the son. Sky mother, earth father. Everyone else got it the other way round.

The two of them held each other so tightly that nothing could exist in the gap, because there was no gap. Shu came between his children and lifted his daughter up, and the room he made by lifting her is the world. Every version of the picture keeps the strain in it. Geb sprawls below, sometimes propped on one elbow with his knee raised into a hill; Shu stands in the middle with both arms up under her ribs; Nut curves overhead on her fingertips and toes, stretched to a length no human frame would survive, her hands and feet set down at the four cardinal points. Her belly is the underside of heaven. Her limbs are the horizons.

At dusk she swallows the sun. It goes into her mouth at the western edge, travels the dark length of her body through the twelve hours of the night, and at dawn she gives birth to it in the east as Khepri, the scarab, and the new light runs out flat across the desert and warms the stone. She does the same with the stars. One of her stranger titles calls her the sow who eats her piglets, which is exactly what a sky does at sunrise: the small bright things at her belly disappear into her, all of them, every morning, and are back by evening. It is a farmyard image for a cosmic event, and it is not affectionate.

The Greek philosopher Plutarch, writing in the first century CE, tells the birth of her children as a story of rule-breaking. The sun god caught her with Geb and cursed her not to be delivered in any month of any year, so Thoth gambled with the moon, won a seventieth part of its light, made five new days out of the winnings and set them outside the calendar. Osiris was born on the first, Horus the Elder on the second, Set on the third, tearing his way out through her side, then Isis, then Nephthys. It is a good story and it is a late one. Egyptian sources barely touch the episode, and where they hint at it they point at her father rather than her husband; one text places the conception “when the sky was full with gods, unknown to men, while the great Ennead slept.” E. A. Wallis Budge thought Plutarch had padded his Egyptian material with invention. The five epagomenal days themselves, though, were real, kept every year, and the third of them was reckoned unlucky because of who was born on it.

What she does for the dead is the reason her image survives in such quantity. The Coffin Texts ask her to stretch over the deceased, to gather up the scattered bones, to feed them and bear them a second time and carry them up to where she keeps the stars that never set. “O my Mother Nut, stretch yourself over me, that I may be placed among the imperishable stars which are in you, and that I may not die.” Tomb ceilings were painted deep blue and studded with points of gold for the same reason. A ladder called the maqet was laid in the burial so the dead could climb into her. And in one of the most human images Egyptian religion produced, she leans out of a sycamore fig at the edge of the cultivation, half woman and half tree, holding a jar of cool water and a tray of bread out to a soul and its thirsty ba on their way into the desert.

She had other bodies. In the Book of the Heavenly Cow she becomes an enormous cow, and Ra, sick of humanity, climbs onto her back and is carried up out of reach, which is how the sun ends up at a distance. The astronomical compilation the Egyptians called the Fundamentals of the Course of the Stars, and modern scholars call the Book of Nut, hangs the whole working calendar on her: the thirty-six decan stars rising in sequence along her body, marking the hours of the night and the ten-day weeks of the year. In 2024 the astrophysicist Or Graur argued in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage that the undulating dark curve painted along some depictions of her body is the Milky Way, which would make certain coffin lids the earliest surviving pictures of the galaxy.

Her powers are the powers of a boundary. She holds the ordered world in and the formless water out, she times everything by moving the lights across herself, and she is the only route by which anything, sun or soul, gets from death back into morning. Her limits come from the same shape. She cannot move. She is held up by her father and she stays where he put her, arched and silent through the whole catastrophe of her children, unable to reach down to Osiris when Set opens him, unable to do anything for Isis but be overhead. She never gets to stand up. Everything she has, she has by holding still and letting things pass through her, and that is a strange kind of greatness to build a religion on, but the Egyptians built one on it and slept under her for three thousand years.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Egyptian goddess Nut?

Nut is the ancient Egyptian goddess of the sky, whose name is simply the Egyptian word for “sky”. She is the daughter of Shu and Tefnut, the sister and wife of the earth god Geb, and the mother of Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys. She belongs to the Heliopolitan Ennead and is named nearly a hundred times in the Pyramid Texts.

Why did Nut swallow the sun?

In Egyptian cosmology the sun enters Nut’s mouth at the western horizon each evening, travels through her body during the twelve hours of night, and is born from her again at dawn in the east as the scarab god Khepri. The cycle explained sunset and sunrise as a daily death and rebirth, which is why Nut became a goddess of resurrection and a protector of the dead.

Why is Nut painted inside Egyptian coffins?

Her image was placed on the inner lid of the coffin so that she would face the mummy directly once the lid was closed, enclosing the dead person within her starry body. Coffin Text spells ask her to enfold the deceased, reassemble their bones, feed them and give birth to them again among the imperishable stars. Tomb ceilings were painted dark blue with stars for the same purpose.

What does the goddess Nut look like?

Nut is most often shown as a tall, elongated naked woman covered in stars, arched over the earth on her fingertips and toes with her hands and feet at the four cardinal points, wearing the round water-pot hieroglyph of her name on her head. She also appears as a great cow, as a sycamore fig tree offering bread and water to the dead, and as a sow suckling piglets that represent the stars.

Why are Nut’s children born on five extra days?

That version comes from the Greek writer Plutarch in the first century CE, who says the sun god cursed Nut not to give birth in any month of the year, and that Thoth won five extra days from the moon at dice so that she could bear Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set, Isis and Nephthys outside the calendar. Egyptian sources themselves say very little about the episode, so the tale should be read as a late Greek telling rather than an Egyptian text, though the five epagomenal days it explains were a genuine part of the Egyptian year.

Related Entries

Geb, Shu, Tefnut, Atum, Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, Horus, Ra, Khepri, Thoth, Hathor, Ba, Neith