This morning’s sketch was a toy hieroglyph representing the Egyptian sun god Re. But it’s more than just a symbol, it’s a full-blown mythology crammed into one plastic bird.
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The bird is a Bennu, the manifestation of Re’s spirit. The sun disc on its head represents the god himself. The whole setup is supposed to show how Re is reborn each morning, lifted from the underworld by the bird, sails across the sky in a boat pushed by scarabs, and then dies into the underworld at night, only to merge with Osiris and rise again at dawn.
The Egyptians named him differently depending on the time of day. In the morning he’s Khepri (the rising sun), in his prime he’s Re, and in the evening he becomes Atum, the elder sun. He created his children Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture) without any help. Those two made Geb (earth) and Nut (sky), who mated and gave birth to Osiris, the same god Re merges with nightly to reboot the whole cycle. (singing) I’m my own grandpa…
It sounds wild, but it’s just how people tried to make sense of their world. Scarabs roll dung across the desert? Well then, clearly they must be pushing the sun too. It gave order to the day, meaning to death, and reassurance that life had rhythm. People wanted predictability, and religion helped provide it.
A thousand years after Re showed up in the Pyramid Texts, Akhenaten and Nefertiti tried to promote the sun disc itself, Aten, as the only god. That went about as well as you’d expect. The people revolted, the city was destroyed, and monotheism didn’t catch on. But it’s still fascinating to see how that sun disc became the center of an early, if brief, attempt at one-god worship.
And while academics insist that words like “Re,” “ray,” “rey,” and even “Atum” and “autumn” aren’t related because they come from different language families, I find that hard to swallow. Re is Afroasiatic, Ray is Indo-European, and that’s where the experts draw the line. But these weren’t isolated civilizations. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and everyone else along the Mediterranean were constantly trading, marrying, and sharing ideas. They didn’t keep their myths and vocabulary sealed off by family tree branches.
So when I hear that the sun god is named Re, and the English word for a beam of sunlight is ray, and the Spanish word for king is rey, and the god of sunset is Atum, and the season of sunset is autumn, yeah, I think maybe there’s a little more cultural blending going on than the official story allows. In Texas, the mix of English and Spanish is usually referred to as Spanglish. Let’s call the language blend of Greek and Egyptian Grektian, the kind of natural mix you’d expect from neighbors who’ve been bumping into each other for a few thousand years.
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