Horus
Horus 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.
Meaning
Horus (HOR-us, as Dictionary.com respells it) was a falcon god and one of the most important gods of Egypt from very early times; a falcon usually taken for Horus already appears on the Narmer Palette, the Global Egyptian Museum notes. The museum gives his name as “the far-away one”, the sky god, while Wallis Budge, writing in 1904, read it as “he who is above”. Artists drew him as a falcon or a falcon-headed man. Budge says that as Horus the Elder he usually wears the crowns of the South and the North united, the double crown that marks its wearer as ruler of the Two Lands; as Horus the Child, Harpocrates, he is a naked boy with the sidelock of youth and a finger to his mouth. The sun and the moon were the eyes of the sky god. The eye Horus lost in his fight with Set, and got back with the help of Thoth or Hathor, became the eye of Horus, and every temple offering was called by its name. The Greeks equated him with Apollo. Kemetic Orthodoxy, a modern practice of the Egyptian religion, calls him Heru, the god of kingship, and names the throne of its leader, the Nisut, the Heru throne.
Origin and history
Horus is several gods under one name. The Global Egyptian Museum separates the Great Horus, Haroeris, the brother of Osiris and later the tenth member of the Ennead of Heliopolis, from Horus the son of Osiris and Isis, Harsiese, who had to fight his uncle Set for his father’s throne; the Egyptians themselves let the difference fade. Budge makes Horus the Elder the twin of Set, the face of the sky by day against Set’s face by night, and Plutarch has Arueris, “whom they call Apollo”, born on the second of the five days added to the year.
The fight for the throne is told in the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, and a complete version survives on papyrus. In Adolf Erman’s retelling of 1907, Horus grew up hidden in the Delta marshes, and when his arm was strong he fought Set: “a fearful fight, which cost Horus an eye”. Isis then led him into the hall of Geb, where Set brought an action disputing his birth and his right to inherit. The gods sat in court and found “that the word of Horus was true”; he went out crowned at Geb’s command and took the government of both lands. The Global Egyptian Museum adds that Horus tried to spear Set when Set turned into a hippopotamus, and that the divine tribunal decided for Horus. Budge lists among the forms of Horus “the piercer”, a hawk-headed man driving his long spear into an unseen foe.
The king as Horus
Every king of Egypt was taken for Horus on earth. One of his five names was his Horus name, written inside a serekh, a rectangle drawn as the front of the royal palace, with a falcon on top: “Horus on (= in) the palace”, in the Global Egyptian Museum’s gloss. When the king died he became Osiris, and his successor, the new Horus, took the throne. Kemetic Orthodoxy keeps the idea: its Nisut bears the “kingly ka” and sits on the Heru throne, but is “a mortal human”, and “We do not worship Her as a goddess”, in its own words.
Horus or Ra?
Both are men with a falcon’s head. The Global Egyptian Museum describes Ra, or Re, as a falcon-headed man with a sun disk and a cobra, the uraeus, while Horus as Budge describes him wears the double crown. The two also merge. Harakhty, “Horus of the Horizon”, the god of the morning sun, was merged so early with the sun god that he became Re-Harakhty, and from the New Kingdom the Sphinx of Giza was worshipped as Horus in the Horizon. The winged disk carved over temple doors is Horus too: in the Edfu legend Budge translated, Horus of Behutet took the form of a great winged sun disk to fight Ra’s enemies, and Ra ordered that every sanctuary with a winged disk be a sanctuary of Horus of Behutet.
Edfu
Edfu, Behdet in Egyptian, was probably his best-known cult centre, and its temple is the best preserved in Egypt. The present building was begun in 237 BC on the remains of a much older sanctuary and took 180 years to finish. The Greeks called the town Apollinopolis, after the god they took Horus to be.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsSetSet’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.
- The eye Horus lost in his fight with Set and got back, made into the commonest amuletEye of HorusThe eye of the god Horus, torn out in his fight with Set and made whole again: as the uzat or utchat, one of the commonest amulets of ancient Egypt.
See also
Winged sun disk, Hawk symbolism, Apollo, Ra, Osiris, Isis.
Sources
- Horus, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Horus
- Serekh, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Serekh
- Edfu, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Edfu
- Re, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Re
- Harakhty, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Harakhty
- Double crown, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Double crown
- Seth, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Seth
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. I, ch. XV, The Horus gods, pp. 466–469, 486
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 34–35
- Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1912, Project Gutenberg, The legend of Horus of Edfu and the winged disk
- Isis and Osiris, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), § 12
- Frequently Asked Questions, Carlisle Transportation Products (The Carlstar Group), FAQ text
- What is Kemetic Orthodoxy?, Kemetic Orthodox Religion, House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), What is Kemetic Orthodoxy?
- Dictionary.com: Horus, Dictionary.com, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Dictionary.com
- Osiris, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Osiris
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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