Benu Bird

BEN-oo

egyptian: bnw

Definition

The Benu bird — Egyptian bnw, also written Bennu — is a heron-shaped sun and creator god from the religion of Heliopolis in ancient Egypt. It was said to be the first being to land on the primeval mound where the world began, at the cult center the Egyptians called Iunu (Heliopolis). The Benu is linked to the rising sun and to cycles of renewal, and — in one rare inscription from the Ptolemaic period — to the planet Venus.

In Tradition

Egyptologists — Wilkinson, in Complete Gods and Goddesses (2003), and Clagett, in his Ancient Egyptian Science Vol II commentary on the Harkhebi inscription (Doc III.18) — read the Benu as a creator god of Heliopolis whose periodic reappearance stands for the renewal of the cosmos. The Greeks reshaped the Benu into the phoenix (Herodotus II.73), but the Egyptian Benu is the older figure and is not the Greek phoenix in any direct, unbroken line: the Greek myth is a later, Hellenistic borrowing.

In Practice

The Benu turns up in Egyptian funerary writing from the Pyramid Texts onward as a creator god tied to Atum-Ra and to the morning sun coming up over the eastern horizon. Its sanctuary at Heliopolis (Iunu) was Egypt's chief center of sun-worship. One rare astronomical mention survives in the back-pillar inscription of the astronomer Harkhebi — a 3rd-century-BCE text, first published by Daressy in 1916, edited by Neugebauer and Parker (EAT, 1969), and translated by Clagett in 1995. There the dead astronomer's daily duties include watching for the dawn first-rising of the decan Akh "beside Bennu (Venus) from earth." It is the only surviving Egyptian text that identifies Bennu directly with the planet Venus rather than with the sun or with creation.

Historical Origin

The earliest mythological mention of the Benu is in the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, c. 2400-2300 BCE). The rare Bennu-as-Venus identification appears on the back-pillar inscription of the astronomer Harkhebi's statue (3rd century BCE, Ptolemaic) — first published by Daressy in 1916, edited by Neugebauer and Parker (EAT, 1969), and translated by Clagett in Ancient Egyptian Science Vol II, Doc III.18 (1995). The figure is also treated in Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (2003).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading