Nut
The 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.
Meaning
Nut was the sky. Budge (1904) calls her the personification of the heavens, the daughter of Shu and Tefnut, wife of the earth god Geb (Seb in his spelling) and mother of Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys. She is best known bending over the earth with her hands and feet at its corners, her head in the west and stars on her body (Global Egyptian Museum); Budge says her arms and legs stand for the four pillars on which the sky rested. In these pictures Shu holds her up and Geb lies on the ground beneath. Standing, she is a woman with a water pot on her head, the sign that spells her name, and she sometimes wears the horns and disc of Hathor (Budge). She also appears with wings, as a cow, and as a goddess in a sycamore tree pouring out water for the dead.
Origin and history
Egyptian texts tell how earth and sky were parted. In the account Erman gives, Nut lay on her brother Geb until their father Shu thrust himself between them and raised her up, and with her all the gods made so far, which she counted and made into stars. In another legend Erman tells, the aged Ra, weary of mankind, climbs onto the back of the cow-faced Nut, who carries him up and becomes the heavens.
Her body is the sun’s road. In the Global Egyptian Museum’s summary, the sun travelled along her body each day to the west, where she swallowed it; it passed through her body in the night, and she gave birth to it again in the east the next morning. Budge gives this as one myth and records another, in which the sun sails up her legs and over her back in one boat until noon and changes boats for the rest of the day. The cycle is painted on the ceilings of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
Plutarch tells a Greek version of how her children were born, with Rhea for Nut, Helios for Ra and Hermes for Thoth, as Budge glosses the names. The Sun cursed her so that she could not give birth in any month or year. Hermes, who loved her, played draughts with the moon, won a seventieth part of each of her periods of light, and made five days from his winnings to add to the 360 of the year. The Egyptians, Plutarch says, kept these five days as the birthdays of the gods, and on the first of them Osiris was born.
Nut on coffin lids
Because she bore the sun again each morning, the Egyptians hoped to be born again through her after death, the Global Egyptian Museum explains, and Nut became a goddess of the dead who stretched over them to protect them. The sarcophagus and the tomb were identified with her from early on: Old Kingdom burial chambers had ceilings painted with stars, and the sarcophagus could be called “mother”. Many later coffins have Nut on the inside of the lid, “literally stretching herself out above the deceased”. In the Pyramid Texts, Erman notes, Nut places the dead as an imperishable star upon her.
A sky goddess with few temples
For all her place in tombs, Nut had little cult of her own. Erman, writing in 1907, says she “received scarcely any veneration” in historical times. Budge says her shrines “were not very numerous” and names a Per-Nut at Memphis.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsHathorThe 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.
- The same shape in Adinkra symbolsOsram ne Nsoromma (moon and star)Osram ne Nsoromma, “the moon and the star”, is the adinkra crescent with a star above it. It stands for love and faithfulness.
See also
Geb, Ra, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set.
Sources
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume II, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), ch. V, pp. 100–105; ch. VI (Osiris), summary of Plutarch
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 12, 15, 29, 31
- Nut, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, entry
- Isis and Osiris, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), section 12
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or stars.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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