Ogdoad (Egyptian)

In Egyptian mythology, the Ogdoad (Greek ογδοάς "the eightfold", Egyptian Khemenu, Ḫmnw) were eight primordial deities worshipped in Hermopolis during the Old Kingdom period (27th to 22nd centuries).

While there is no doubt as to the antiquity of this group of gods, such that even at the time of composition of the Pyramid Texts towards the end of the Old Kingdom period they were antiquated and forgotten by everyone except religious experts, the oldest known pictorial representations of the group do not predate the time of Seti I. Budge (1904) compares the concept to a group of four pairs of primeval gods mentioned in the Babylonian Enûma Eliš.

Texts of the Late Period describe them as having the heads of frogs (male) and serpents (female), and they are often depicted in this way in reliefs of the Greco-Roman period.

The eight deities were arranged in four male-female pairs (the female names being merely derivative female forms of the male names), as follows:.

The names of Nu and Nut are written with the determiners for sky and water, and it seems clear that they represent the primordial waters.

Ḥeḥu and Ḥeḥut have no readily identifiable determiners; according to a suggestion due to Brugsch (1885), the name is associated with a term for an undefined or unlimited number, ḥeḥ, suggesting a concept similar to Greek aion. But from the context of a number of passages in which Ḥeḥu is mentioned, Brugsch also suggested that he may be a personification of the atmosphere between heaven and earth (c.f. Shu).

The names of Kekui and Kekuit are written with a determiner combining the sky hieroglyph with a staff or scepter used for words related to darkness and obscurity, and kkw as a regular word means "darkness", suggesting that these gods represent primordial darkness, comparable to Greek Erebus, but in some aspects they appear to represent day as well as night, or the change from night to day and from day to night.

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