Ra / Re | |||||||||||
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God of the Sun | |||||||||||
In one of his many forms, Ra, god of the sun, has the head of a falcon and the sun-disk inside a cobra resting on his head.
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Name in hieroglyphs |
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Major cult center | Heliopolis | ||||||||||
Symbol | Sun disk | ||||||||||
Consort | Hathor, Sekhmet, Bastet, and Mut (as Amun Ra) | ||||||||||
Parents | None, self-created Neith (in some accounts) | ||||||||||
Siblings | Apep, Thoth, Sobek, Serket | ||||||||||
Offspring | Shu, Tefnut, Bastet, Ma'at, Hathor, sometimes Serket |
Ra (/rɑː/;Egyptian: Rꜥ, ) or Re (/reɪ/; Coptic: ⲣⲏ, Rē) is the ancient Egyptian sun god. By the Fifth Dynasty in the 25th and 24th centuries BC, he had become a major god in ancient Egyptian religion, identified primarily with the noon sun.
In later Egyptian dynastic times, Ra was merged with the god Horus, as Ra-Horakhty ("Ra, who is Horus of the Two Horizons"). He was believed to rule in all parts of the created world: the sky, the earth, and the underworld. He was associated with the falcon or hawk. When in the New Kingdom the god Amun rose to prominence he was fused with Ra as Amun-Ra. During the Amarna Period, Akhenaten suppressed the cult of Ra in favor of another solar deity, the Aten, the deified solar disc, but after the death of Akhenaten the cult of Ra was restored.