Egyptian gods and their symbols
The gods of ancient Egypt as tomb and temple art shows them, from jackal-headed Anubis and lioness-headed Sekhmet to Isis with the throne on her head, and the crowns, sceptres and animals that identify each one.
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Osiris and his family
- OsirisOsiris’s symbols are the crook and flail in his hands and the atef, the tall white crown with a plume on each side. He is the Egyptian king of the dead, drawn as a mummy with only his hands and face free, sometimes with green skin, and the djed pillar was read as his backbone.
- IsisIsis’s symbol is the throne, the hieroglyph that writes her name, which she wears on her head. From the New Kingdom she also wears the cow’s horns and sun disc she took from Hathor, and the knot amulet called the tyet was read as her blood.
- HorusHorus is the falcon, or the man with a falcon’s head, who wears the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Every king was Horus on earth, so a falcon sits on top of the king’s name, and the eye Horus lost and got back became the eye of Horus amulet.
- SetSet’s symbol is the Set animal, a beast with a head like a donkey’s or a camel’s, pricked ears and a forked, upright tail, which has never been identified. He was the Egyptian god of the desert and disorder, the murderer of Osiris in the later myth, and also the god who beat the serpent Apep each night for the sun.
- AnubisAnubis is the black jackal, or the man with a jackal’s head, who guarded the cemetery and embalmed the dead. In the judgment of the dead he tends the balance where the heart is weighed, and his emblem, the imiut, is a headless animal skin hung on a pole.
- GebGeb was the Egyptian god of the earth, and his symbol is the goose, which he wears on his head. He is often painted green, lying beneath the arched body of his wife Nut, the sky.
Creation, the sun and the sky
- RaThe Egyptian sun god, drawn as a man with a falcon’s head and the disc of the sun, ringed by a serpent, on his head. His city was Heliopolis, and the scarab beetle was the sun as it rose.
- PtahThe god of Memphis and patron of craftsmen, drawn as a man wrapped like a mummy, in a close cap, holding the was sceptre, the ankh and the djed pillar. The Greeks called him Hephaestus, and the Apis bull of Memphis was thought to hold his soul.
- KhnumThe ram-headed creator god of Elephantine at the Nile’s First Cataract, who shaped people on a potter’s wheel. His ram’s horns twist out sideways, which tells him apart from Amun, whose ram’s horns curl.
- ThothThe Egyptian god of writing, wisdom and the moon, drawn with the head of an ibis, often holding a scribe’s palette and pen, or shown as an ibis or a baboon. The Greeks identified him with Hermes.
- Ma’atThe Egyptian goddess of truth, justice and the right order of the world, drawn as a woman with a single ostrich feather upright on her head. The feather alone could stand for her.
- NutThe Egyptian sky goddess, drawn as a woman arched over the earth with her hands and feet at its edges and stars on her body. She swallowed the sun each evening and gave birth to it each morning, and was painted inside coffin lids to stretch over the dead.
Guardians and protectors
- HathorThe Egyptian goddess of the sky, of women, love, music and drink, first worshipped as a cow. Her symbols are the cow’s horns with the sun disc between them, the sistrum rattle and the menat necklace, and her face with cow’s ears crowns the columns of her temples.
- SekhmetThe lioness-headed goddess of Memphis, wife of Ptah, whose name means “the Powerful”. She wears a sun disc ringed by a cobra on her lion’s head, and Egyptian texts call her the eye of the sun god Ra, sent out to destroy his enemies.
- BastetThe cat goddess of Bubastis in the Nile Delta, drawn as a woman with a cat’s head holding a sistrum, often with a basket on her arm. Herodotus saw her festival there and wrote that the Egyptians took their dead cats to Bubastis to be embalmed and buried.
- SobekThe crocodile god of Egypt, drawn as a man with a crocodile’s head or as a crocodile, wearing a sun disc with a cobra, or horns, a disc and plumes. His chief temples were at Kom Ombo and in the Faiyum, where the Greeks called his city Crocodilopolis.
- TaweretThe hippopotamus goddess who protected women in pregnancy and childbirth, drawn standing upright with a swollen belly, lion’s legs and a crocodile’s tail, resting a paw on the sa sign of protection. Her name means “the great one”.
- BesA protective dwarf god with a lion’s mane and ears, a feathered crown and his tongue out, usually shown face-on. Egyptians put him in birth rooms, carved him on mirrors, cosmetic jars and pillows, and hung his amulets on children’s necklaces.
About egyptian gods and their symbols
Egyptian gods and their symbols follows the gods of ancient Egypt through the way Egyptian artists drew them, so that a god on a temple wall, a coffin or an amulet can be told from the god beside it. Most of the pages are about a head, a crown and the thing held in the hand. Adolf Erman wrote in his Handbook of Egyptian Religion (1907) that the Egyptians of the earliest times often thought of their gods in animal form: the sky as a cow, the sun as a sparrow-hawk, the moon as an ibis, the god of the dead as a jackal, the water god as a crocodile. Later artists kept the animals, and as a rule showed the gods in human form with the heads of their animals. That is why Anubis is a man with a jackal’s head, Thoth a man with an ibis’s head, Horus and Ra men with the heads of falcons, and Sobek a man with a crocodile’s head.
The gods here are in three groups. Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, Anubis and Geb are Osiris and his family. Ra, Ptah, Khnum, Thoth, Ma’at and Nut are the gods of creation, the sun and the sky. Hathor, Sekhmet, Bastet, Sobek, Taweret and Bes are the guardians, some of them fierce. The eye of Horus, the ankh and the other signs they carry have their own pages in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Crowns and sceptres
Erman thought the first images of the gods were simple. People carved rough figures in human or animal form and told them apart by their crowns, made of handfuls of reeds, the horns of sheep or cows, or ostrich feathers, and for a sceptre the gods carried a plain staff. Hathor’s crown goes back to the cow: when she is not given a cow’s ears, Erman writes, she has a woman’s head and a headdress of two horns with the sun between them.
Telling the cat from the lioness
The heads are not always easy to tell apart. Erman notes that Bast, whom the Greeks called Bubastis, is cat-headed and usually holds the sistrum of the dancing women and carries a basket on her arm; when those are left out, her cat’s head is hard to distinguish from the lion’s head of Sekhmet, and the Egyptians themselves connected the two goddesses. The animal whose head Set wears was taken in later times for a donkey, though Erman thought it was meant for some animal the Egyptians of historical times did not know.
The animals in the temples
Where a god and an animal belonged together, the animal was kept in the god’s temple. Erman lists a tank with a crocodile in the temple of Sobk, a cat in the temple of Bast, and sparrow-hawks on perches in the sanctuary of the sun god; the bull Apis lived in the sanctuary of Ptah at Memphis. Some of these animals belonged to their gods in much the way the doves belonged to Aphrodite and the owls to Athene.
A god in two shapes
A god could have more than one form. The Global Egyptian Museum describes Thoth as usually a man with the head of an ibis, holding a scribe’s palette and a pen, with the crescent and the full moon on his head, but sometimes wholly an ibis, and often a baboon. In the Ptolemaic Period the Greeks matched him with their Hermes.
Sources
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion (Adolf Erman, tr. A. S. Griffith), Adolf Erman, A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, translated by A. S. Griffith (1907), Internet Archive, chapter I, pp. 5–23
- Thoth (Global Egyptian Museum glossary), Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, entry
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research