Khnum

The potter’s wheel is the best-known picture of him. According to his priests at Elephantine, Budge writes, Khnum made the first egg from which the sun came, made the gods, fashioned the first man on a potter’s wheel, and went on building up people’s bodies and keeping them alive. The British Museum’s 1909 guide has an illustration of him fashioning a man on the wheel. The Global Egyptian Museum suggests he became a potter through his tie to the Nile’s water and mud, and adds that he shaped a person’s ka on the wheel too, made the child in its mother’s womb, and helped the goddess Heqet at births.

The Egyptians believed the waters of the Nile came out of the primeval ocean through a hole in the earth at Elephantine, and that the flood entered Egypt there (Global Egyptian Museum). An inscription found by Charles Wilbour in 1890 on a rock on the island of Sahal tells the story Budge calls the Seven Years’ Famine. King Tcheser, whom Budge identifies with the third king of the Third Dynasty, grieves because for seven years the Nile has not flooded properly, and learns that Khnum is the guardian of the flood, who keeps the doors that hold it in and draws back the bolts at the proper time. Budge dates the text in its present form no earlier than the Ptolemaic period, though he thought its subject much older.

Which came first, the potter or the water god, is a point where the two older scholars part. Budge thought Khnum was originally a god of the Nile and its flood. Erman, writing in 1907, thought the cataract god, “lord of the cool waters”, was a character his Elephantine temple gave him, which “certainly was not his originally”.