The Birth of the Egyptian Gods - Featured Egyptology Page

The Great White, an early baboon god from
 the Late Predynastic Period, c. 3000 BC. 
Egyptian Museum, Berlin.

The genesis of the Egyptian gods goes far back into prehistoric times. These earliest beginnings occurred long before Egypt's existence as a nation state and the invention of writing, so we are forced to work with only non-written evidence, often from relatively uncertain contexts and settings. Although scholars of anthropology, prehistory and religion have struggled to analyze this formative stage in Egyptian religion, the available evidence remains difficult to interpret and is subject to differ ing opinions. Nevertheless, it would seem to suggest the presence of the concept of the sacred in the exis tence of apparent cult objects, in human and animal burials, and in areas where formal rituals appear to have been enacted. Whether such artifacts and sites actually reflect belief in a divine being or beings is unknown but, as various scholars have stressed, the care with which the dead were buried in the prehis toric period, and the afterlife belief implied by that care, certainly suggests that the necessary intellec tual sophistication was present for such belief...Read More at the Birth of the Egyptian God