The Intricate Family Dynamics of Ancient Egyptian Deities

When I was seven years old, there was only one book release I cared about: Egyptology: Search for the Tomb of Osiris (2004). A scrapbook journal from a lost expedition, the bestselling children’s book nestled interactive envelopes and postcards within its illustrated pages, including a piece of “mummy cloth” and a guide to decoding hieroglyphics. I was entranced — by the textured gold and plastic gemstone cover, but also by the conceit that at least part of this history was real. I thought there truly was a missing archaeologist named Emily Sands who traveled to Cairo in 1926, and that her journals had only just been discovered for me, a girl in Seattle, Washington, to devour.

Divine Egypt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s special exhibition of ancient Egyptian art, returned me to a childlike state of awe and admiration for this civilization. More than 200 works spanning 3,000 years, pulled from The Met’s collection, in addition to some international loans, balance the dense world-building necessary to understand this divine hierarchy with the miracle of their artistic craft. Let me be your Emily Sands, and guide you through the messy family drama of the gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt.

Amun-Re

The swarm of museum-goers parts like a sea at the gate of Divine Egypt before a stone statue of the god of kings, Amun-Re. He shelters the pharaoh Tutankhamun — you might know him better as “King Tut” — between his shins, his hands on the little king’s shoulders, greeting visitors with a cool stare. It’s the perfect embodiment of how this exhibition treats Egyptian deities: as idiosyncratic personalities just as worthy of our attention as the celebrity royals whose tombs we’ve visited in the permanent collection downstairs.

One of the principal deities of the New Kingdom, Amun-Re’s essence is hard to encapsulate — he is multiple gods melded together as well as his own entity, a force matching the extraordinary power Egypt reached by the 18th Dynasty. Turning the corner from Amun-Re and King Tut, we enter the complex world of polytheism (where Re exists separately from Amun-Re, a composite god).

Re

Where would we be without Re, creator of the world? You don’t need to be a fan of Afrofuturist jazz ensemble Sun Ra Arkestra to know one answer, though it’d probably give a clue. Re is the rhythm of life rumbling underneath all of Egypt. Every night, he goes into the earth to be reborn, where he must kill the snakes in his way so that he may still rise and greet us with sunlight in the morning. He appears in a Late Period–Ptolemaic Period statuette as a kind of otter-mongoose hybrid, raising his paws and smiling, wearing the solar disc headdress, ready to pounce. Felines were thought of similarly: fearsome hunters protecting those who try to nibble away at the sun god’s power.

Nut

Re isn’t acting alone. In some tellings, he doesn’t just descend underground; he gets swallowed by the sky goddess Nut, who rebirths him every morning. One side gallery displays the interiors and exteriors of a well-preserved coffin, displayed vertically and encased in glass. At eye level