Talk:List of Egyptian deities

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Ancient Egypt: Egyptian religion High‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Ancient Egypt, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Egyptological subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Ancient EgyptWikipedia:WikiProject Ancient EgyptTemplate:WikiProject Ancient EgyptAncient Egypt

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This article is supported by Egyptian religion work group (assessed as High-importance).

WikiProject Ancient Egypt to-do list:

Needed articles.

We should have an article on every pyramid and every nome in Ancient Egypt. I'm sure the rest of us can think of other articles we should have.

Cleanup.

To start with, most of the general history articles badly need attention. And I'm told that at least some of the dynasty articles need work. Any other candidates?

Standardize the Chronology.

A boring task, but the benefit of doing it is that you can set the dates !(e.g., why say Khufu lived 2589-2566? As long as you keep the length of his reign correct, or cite a respected source, you can date it 2590-2567 or 2585-2563)

Stub sorting

Anyone? I consider this probably the most unimportant of tasks on Wikipedia, but if you believe it needs to be done . . .

Data sorting.

This is a project I'd like to take on some day, & could be applied to more of Wikipedia than just Ancient Egypt. Take one of the standard authorities of history or culture -- Herotodus, the Elder Pliny, the writings of Breasted or Kenneth Kitchen, & see if you can't smoothly merge quotations or information into relevant articles. Probably a good exercise for someone who owns one of those impressive texts, yet can't get access to a research library.

Why and how I separated this list again

After discussion at Talk:Ancient Egyptian deities#List of deities, again petered out, I separated this list from ancient Egyptian deities itself again, given that one editor opposed the separation, and two, besides me, supported. To sum up my reasons for separation again:

Although there is obviously an overlap in topic between an article describing Egyptian deities as a class and one that lists them individually, there is also a certain amount of distinction between the two. I mentioned the example of castle and list of castles.
Egyptian deities number in the thousands, so if the list ever came close to being complete, incorporating it into the main article would violate WP:Manual of Style/Embedded lists#Size.
If, however, the list were trimmed to a size where it could fit in the main article, it would probably have to be limited to the deities we have articles on, which would make the list rather redundant—we already have the category system, the list of deities at Template:Ancient Egyptian religion (a version of which already sits at the bottom of the main deities article), index of ancient Egypt-related articles, and index of Egyptian mythology articles.

The list was also very flawed. It left out several gods who we already have articles on and may well meet the notability criteria, such as Werethekau, Unut, Shezmu, Mehet-Weret, Kherty, Ihy, Hesat, Banebdjedet, and Baal. It included deities that we do not have articles on, such as Apesh (apparently an underworld turtle demon) and Swenet (a personification of Aswan). Its descriptions of the deities were inadequately sourced (somebody recently introduced references that said nothing more than "Kane Chronicles") and incorporated a lot of dubious claims.

While doing the split, therefore, I rewrote the list using the two major English-language reference works on Egyptian deities, now listed at the bottom of this page. The entries in each of these books extend to pretty minor gods like Ba-Pef, Khefthernebes, and Fetket. They cover most of the same gods, although some minor deities appear in one source but not the other. If a deity doesn't appear in either source, it's pretty unlikely to rate a separate article. So as to have no unreferenced entries on the list and no links to articles that don't exist, I used these inclusion criteria in rewriting the list:

If a god isn't listed in Wilkinson 2003 or Hart 2005, I don't include it.
If a god doesn't have a Wikipedia article, I don't include it.

I devised these as temporary criteria, just to have something reasonably orderly in place. If we can use more extensive sources—the big one is Lexikon der ägyptischen Götter und Götterbezeichnungen—we can create a more extensive list with broader inclusion criteria. A. Parrot (talk) 03:43, 26 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Goals for future improvement

If the list does expand beyond these narrow limits, so as to become a catalogue of deities too minor to merit their own articles, it should still have some restraint. I doubt we want to be as inclusive as the Lexikon; it consists of eight volumes! Obviously, any additional entries must be supported by reliable sources. I can contribute some entries to that effort; I've collected a list of deities I've found mentioned in RSes other than Wilkinson and Hart, which numbers more than 60 at the moment.

Another problem is internal organization. I've discussed this problem before, at Template talk:Ancient Egyptian religion#Grouping the Gods. Thematic organization is difficult because the gods' roles were not confined to neat categories. Alphabetical organization (which the list now uses) is also problematic, because there are so many variant spellings. Wilkinson 2003 uses a third system, based on the most common appearance of the deity (male anthropomorphic, female anthropomorphic, mammalian, avian, etc.), though that is probably less useful for most people than thematic or alphabetical. I've previously suggested sections for male and female, which is a less flexible division than most others and reflects the subdivision of Category:Egyptian deities into Category:Egyptian gods and Category:Egyptian goddesses, but so many entries would belong in each section that such a system would not be much improvement over a purely alphabetical one. A. Parrot (talk) 03:43, 26 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Gods of Egypt

The usage and primary topic of "Gods of Egypt" is under discussion, see talk:Gods of Egypt (film) -- 65.94.43.89 (talk) 04:39, 17 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Gonna work on this as well.

There are a good amount of sources on a lot of the gods on this list. So I’m gonna work on as many of them as I can.

CycoMa (talk) 02:46, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I was wondering, Could Apep/Apophis be moved to the 'A' section of the Major Deities instead of Minor? Or is there a reason (minimal sources, lack of papyri mention, etc.) to keep it in the Minor section? Deathbysushi12 (talk) 15:46, 24 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Genders terms

God and Goddess are genderd terms it was dumb of you to use male and female 2601:188:CA81:D30:9494:AA4D:3A03:A6A0 (talk) 22:37, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

additions of different notable Forms of horus.

I recently added an entry for the form of Horus known as Heru-ur, Haroeris or Horus the Elder, however it was removed by a user named Tioser. The reasons given were first, the source I provided did not back up my claim that Heru-ur was the son of Geb and Nut. That is on me I should have been more thorough however, they also claimed that because Heru-ur is merely a form of Horus (something I stated in the entry) and not a distinct god he should not be added. However many deities on this list can be considered just a form of another deity (e.g. Khepri can be considered a form of Ra). Furthermore many of these "forms" including Heru-ur were considered independent deities by peoples in certain times and places because Ancient Egypt was neither constant nor had a unified mythology, many different towns and cities had versions of the pantheon that differed, sometimes marginally sometimes radically. Because of the reasons above I believe that an entry for both, Heru-ur and other notable forms of Horus like Harpocrates should be added, even if they were only viewed as an independent god by one town in late Ptolemaic Egypt or something. PharaohCrab (talk) 16:05, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]