Nun

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Nun — also written Nu — is the ancient Egyptian name for the primeval waters: the dark, limitless, motionless expanse that the texts place before the world began, and from which the first act of creation emerged. He is less a god with a story than a condition given a name. Where other deities act, Nun is mostly that which is acted out of — the formless before form, imagined as an ocean without surface or shore. Nothing in him distinguishes one place from another; there is no above and below, no inside and outside, no light to mark a beginning. This is not yet emptiness, which would already be a kind of order. It is the fullness that precedes division: everything that will ever exist held undeveloped in a single inert medium, waiting on the first act that will tell one thing from another.

What kind of being Nun is

The Egyptian language had a way of speaking about states as persons. Nun is the clearest case. To give the abyss a name and a face is not to misunderstand it as a character but to make it addressable — something a hymn can hail, something a text can place in a sequence. In the surviving art he is rendered, when he is rendered at all, as a bearded man standing waist-deep in his own substance, arms raised to lift the boat of the rising sun clear of the water, sometimes given the blue or green of the flood, sometimes a frog’s head among the powers of the deep. The image holds the paradox steady: the waters that have no form are shown with a form, so that creation can be shown coming out of them. The gesture of the raised arms is the whole cosmogony in a single posture — the deep itself handing the ordered world up into being.

What Nun is not is equally definite. He is not the enemy of the gods, not a monster to be slain, not a force the creator must defeat. The first act of creation is an emergence, not a conquest. Order does not arrive by killing chaos; it arrives by rising out of it, and the relation between the two stays one of descent rather than war for the whole life of the cosmos.

The rival cosmogonies

Egyptian thought did not settle on a single creation account, and Nun appears across the rival versions as their common starting point — the one premise the competing priesthoods shared even where they disagreed about everything after it.

In the Heliopolitan tradition, centered on the sun-city the Egyptians called Annu and the Greeks Heliopolis, the creator Atum rises out of Nun and brings the first gods into being. Atum is self-developed — the one who came into existence by his own act when nothing else existed — and he stands on, or rather is, the first mound of solid ground to break the surface. From him proceed the first divine pair, Shu and Tefnut, air and moisture, and from them in turn the framework of the sky and earth, the great group of nine that ordered the Egyptian pantheon. The Pyramid Texts, the oldest body of this material, carved on the inner walls of the royal tombs of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, address the creator as the one who mounted up as the high ground and shone at the dawn of things — the cosmogony compressed into a single image of the first land catching the first light.

In the cosmology associated with Hermopolis Magna — the city of Thoth, which the Egyptians called Khemennu, “the Eight” — Nun is not alone. He is grouped with seven other powers into the Ogdoad, the eight deities of the watery chaos who together precede and produce the world. They come in four pairs, each a male and female aspect of one quality of the deep: Nun and his female counterpart Naunet for the primeval waters; a pair for hiddenness, whose male member is Amun, the hidden one who would rise from this obscure pre-creation rank to become king of the gods of the New Kingdom; a pair for endlessness or the limitless; and a pair for darkness. Eight names for the single condition before light, sorted into the qualities a later mind could distinguish in it. Often the Eight are drawn as frogs and serpents — creatures of the mud and the flood — or as baboons greeting the sunrise, the powers of the deep saluting the order that came out of them.

The recurring image across these systems is the same: a mound of earth lifting clear of the flood, the first solid ground breaking a surface that had no surface before. The Egyptians had a name for it, the primeval mound, and they built it into stone — the tapering pyramidion, the sacred benben at Heliopolis, the pyramid itself a model of the first hill. Egyptians who watched the Nile recede each year, leaving fertile silt and the first dry hillocks where water had stood, were describing creation in terms they could see. Every flood-season was the deep returning; every recession was the first land rising again.

A god that is a state

It is worth holding the strangeness of the conception in view. Nun is a deity who is also a place, a substance, and a condition. He can be addressed in the second person and depicted with a body, yet he denotes precisely the absence of the distinctions that make bodies and persons possible. Erik Hornung, whose study of Egyptian conceptions of the divine traced exactly this kind of being, set the Egyptian gods against any demand that they be either clearly personal or clearly abstract; Nun is the limit case, the named non-thing out of which the named things come. The Budge gateway to the funerary literature put the role with documentary plainness: Nu represents the primeval watery mass from which all the gods were evolved, “and upon which floats the bark of ‘millions of years’ containing the sun.”

The deep that never went away

Crucially, Nun was not destroyed by the act of creation. The ordered world, in this picture, is an island of form surrounded and underlain by the chaos it came from — the waters press at the edges of the cosmos and run beneath it. The sky is a held-back ocean; the same deep that preceded the world still stands above it as the celestial waters across which the sun-boat sails, and still lies below it in the depths the dead must pass. Creation did not consume the abyss. It carved a clearing in it.

The sun was held to sink into Nun each night and be renewed there before rising again, so that every dawn repeated the first emergence in miniature. The nightly journey of the sun through the underworld is, in this reading, a return to the deep and a fresh birth out of it — the cosmogony performed once every twenty-four hours. A scene on the great sarcophagus of Seti I shows Nun himself, the god of the primeval water, holding up the boat of the sun with his own hands at the threshold of the world, the first gesture of creation repeated at the moment of each sunrise.

Some texts push the thought to its limit. In one of the spells gathered into the later Book of the Dead, the creator addresses Osiris and tells him what the end of things will be: that the maker will undo all he has made, that the earth will return to the primordial water, to the surging flood, as in its first state, and that when the world has dissolved back into the deep only the creator and Osiris will remain in the undifferentiated waters. The clearing closes; the island sinks; the two who endure outlast even the distinction between life and death. This is the tradition’s own theological claim about the shape of time, not a forecast — but it shows the Egyptians thinking of order as borrowed from chaos rather than opposed to it. What began in Nun ends in Nun, and the interval of the world is the loan.

No temple, every text

Scholars treat Nun as a personification rather than a cult figure: there were no great temples to the primeval waters, no priesthood of the abyss, no festival calendar built around him. He is encountered chiefly in funerary and theological texts rather than in popular worship — in the hymns and spells by which the living mapped the cosmos and the dead navigated it. Where the deep entered the working life of the temple at all, it did so by figure: the rectangular sacred lake beside the sanctuary stood for the primeval waters, so that the daily renewal of the cult was set, symbolically, at the edge of the flood from which the world first came.

The conception is old and remarkably stable. It runs from the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, through the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom, into the New Kingdom and later funerary literature, with the same essential picture intact across nearly two and a half millennia: a creator rising from a limitless deep that he does not abolish. The deities who came after Nun took on cults, oracles, and political fortunes — Amun climbed from one of the eight nameless powers of the Ogdoad to imperial god; Isis and Horus acquired vast popular devotion; the falcon-cobra emblems of kingship like Wadjet guarded the living ruler; and in the Greco-Egyptian age a wholly new figure, Serapis, could be promoted into the pantheon by royal decision. Nun underwent none of this. He stayed what he was from the beginning: the premise, not the player.

The wider company of abysses

The image of a watery deep before the world is not Egypt’s alone, and the Egyptian version sits in conversation with the other Near Eastern cosmogonies without being reducible to them. In the opening of Genesis the spirit of God — Elohim — moves over the face of a dark, formless deep before the first word divides light from darkness, an unformed waste of waters out of which an ordered creation is spoken into being. In the Babylonian account the world is made when Marduk splits the body of the salt-sea chaos and builds the sky and earth from its halves, and the powers of the Mesopotamian underworld — the scorching domain of gods like Nergal — keep their own province beneath the made world. The family resemblance is plain: in each, order is younger than disorder, and the made world is a clearing in something older. But the Egyptian case turns on a difference of relation rather than of imagery. Where the Babylonian creator must defeat the chaos and build from its corpse, the Egyptian creator merely rises from a deep he leaves intact. There is no battle, no slain body, no victory. The waters are not the enemy that had to be killed for the world to stand; they are the substance the world was made of, and they are still there.

Scholarship and the textual record

Nun is known almost entirely from the funerary and theological corpora, and the modern study of him is inseparable from the modern editions of those texts. The foundational philological edition of the oldest layer is Kurt Sethe’s Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte (Leipzig, 1908–22), preceded by Gaston Maspero’s editio princeps, the first published corpus of the Pyramid Texts drawn from the royal pyramids at Saqqara (1894). For the New Kingdom papyrus tradition, E. A. Wallis Budge’s edition and translation of the Papyrus of Ani (British Museum, 1895; enlarged 1913) was the first complete English rendering of the Book of the Dead and remains the load-bearing Anglophone gateway, though its philology has been superseded — the standard modern translation is Raymond O. Faulkner’s The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (British Museum, 1972), which renders the dissolution dialogue of the creator and Osiris in Spell 175. The interpretive frame for Nun as a species of divine being belongs above all to Erik Hornung, whose Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (German 1971; English, Cornell, 1982) is the controlling study of how the Egyptian gods could be at once personal and conceptual. The fullest reference summary of the figure, with its variant spellings and iconography, is the standing scholarly entry on Nun in the standard reference literature, which gathers the cosmogonic roles surveyed above. The primary sun-and-mound material can be read in the Heliopolitan hymns of the Pyramid Texts, where the creator mounts as the first hill and brings the divine company into being.

Naming the abyss did not tame it. The Egyptians kept the deep on the page and out of the temple precisely because it could not be served like a god with appetites; what it could be was acknowledged. A god who is a state, an addressee who is a condition — Nun is the figure in which the tradition admits, without flinching, that the ordered world it lived in was on permanent loan. The light, the dry land, the company of the gods, the kingship, the very distinction between one thing and another: all of it was carved out of a deep that was never removed and never could be, and all of it would, in the tradition’s own reckoning of time, be handed back. The clearing holds for as long as the loan runs. The flood waits at its edges, patient and undivided, exactly as it was before the first morning.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani, 1913) · Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

→ Related: Wadjet · Serapis · Elohim · Heliopolis · Hermopolis Magna · Pyramid Texts · Book Of The Dead · Amun · Thoth · Isis · Horus · Marduk · Nergal