Ra

For most of recorded Egyptian history, Ra was the sun and the sun was a god. From the cult centre at Heliopolis he rose to the head of the pantheon — creator of the world, sustainer of cosmic order, the deity whose name the pharaohs took as their own: every king was the “Son of Ra”. His was not an abstract worship but a daily drama written across the sky. Each night Ra sailed his barque through the underworld and battled the serpent of chaos; each dawn his reappearance proved he had won again. For more than two thousand years, Egypt organised its temples, its kingship and its sense of time around the reliability of that victory.

What no ritual could defend against was a change of empire’s religion. As Rome turned Christian in the fourth century CE, the old cults were first sidelined and then outlawed: the edict of Theodosius I in 391 ordered the pagan temples closed across the empire, and Egypt’s priesthoods, already starved of patronage, fell silent. A few remote sanctuaries held on — the temple of Isis at Philae kept the old gods until around 537 — but the great public worship of the sun was over. The sun, of course, kept rising; it simply stopped being a god anyone addressed. Ra is now a figure in museums and mythology books, the most powerful deity of one of history’s longest-lived civilizations, prayed to by no one.