Geb
Geb 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.
Meaning
Geb (pronounced geb, Dictionary.com says) was the god of the earth, the son of Shu and Tefnut, the husband of the sky goddess Nut and the father of Osiris, Isis, Nephthys and Set. Older books call him Seb: Wallis Budge used that reading in 1904 while noting the Egyptologist Brugsch’s Geb or Keb, which in very early times “undoubtedly seems to have been the correct form”. Budge describes him as a man wearing the white crown, or the crown of the North with the atef added, or a goose. The Global Egyptian Museum adds that he is often coloured green or has plants growing out of him, and is sometimes drawn with an erect penis pointing at the sky, for fertility. The earth was his body, “the house of Seb”. As the god of its surface he gave trees, plants and grain, and as the god beneath it he had authority over the tombs where the dead were laid; snakes lived in him, so he was their lord.
Origin and history
In the Heliopolitan account, earth and sky began joined. Adolf Erman (1907) tells how Nut still lay upon her brother Geb until their father Shu thrust himself between them and raised her up, and with her all the gods, whom she counted and made into stars. The Global Egyptian Museum says many pictures show Geb lying down with Nut stretched above him on her hands and toes, sometimes with Shu holding up the sky between them. Budge adds that his chief seat seems to have been Heliopolis, though no city or district was set apart for him, and that there he and Nut produced the great egg from which the sun god came as a phoenix; for that egg Geb was called the “Great Cackler”, Kenken-ur (see the cosmic egg). Plutarch, writing in Greek, calls the pair Cronus and Rhea, as Budge reads him.
Geb was the last god to rule on earth, and his throne passed down the family. In the hymn Erman quotes, he gave Osiris his inheritance, “the government over the two Egypts”. In the quarrel of Horus and Set he often acts as judge: the Shabaka stone says he first divided Egypt, Upper Egypt to Set and Lower Egypt to Horus, then regretted it and gave the whole country to Horus. So the living king, who was Horus, was called the heir of Geb. In Erman’s retelling the court sat in the hall of Geb, and Horus went out crowned at his command.
Why does Geb wear a goose?
For his name. Budge says the goose on his head is of the species called seb, the same word as the god’s name, and that the bird was sacred to him because he was believed to have travelled through the air in its form. In one scene of the separation of earth and sky the goose, “which is his symbol”, stands by his feet with its beak open, cackling.
The earth that holds the dead
The earth was a grave as well as a field. The Global Egyptian Museum notes his negative side: the dead were buried or shut up in his body, and a Pyramid Text says, “the earth is an abomination for the deceased, he shall not enter into Geb so that he will not decay”. In the Book of the Dead, as Budge reads it, the wicked are held fast by Geb, and the dead ask him to open his jaws for them, open their eyes and loosen their bandaged legs, and say, “My father is Seb, and my mother is Nut”. Geb is also among the gods who watch the weighing of the heart, a man-headed figure in the Papyrus of Ani.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsRaThe 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.
- Geb the Great Cackler and Nut produced the egg from which the sun cameCosmic eggThe idea that the world began as an egg: its shell split into sky and earth, or the first god hatched from it. It is told in the Upanishads and the Puranas, in Orphic poetry, in ancient Egypt, in the Finnish Kalevala and in one Chinese account of Pangu.
See also
Nut, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, Anubis.
Sources
- Geb, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Geb
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume II, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. II, ch. V, The Great Company of the gods of Heliopolis, pp. 94–96, 105; ch. XX (animals)
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. I, ch. XV, The Horus gods, p. 467
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 28–29, 32, 35
- Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1899, Project Gutenberg, Chapter on the judgment
- Isis and Osiris, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), § 12
- Dictionary.com: Geb, Dictionary.com, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Dictionary.com
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from crosses or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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