Khepri (Ḫpr, the Morning Sun)

KHEP-ree

egyptian: Ḫpr

Definition

Khepri (Egyptian Ḫpr, also Khepera) is the dawn aspect of the sun god — the rising, newborn Sun, shown as a scarab beetle or a scarab-headed man. Egyptian religion read the Sun as one god in three forms across the day: Khepri the morning Sun, Re the Sun at full strength, and Atum the aged evening Sun who sinks into the Duat (the underworld) at sunset. So Khepri is not a separate sun-god rival to Re or to the Aten (the sun-disk you meet elsewhere here); he is the Sun caught at the moment of its daily rebirth.

In Tradition

Egyptologists explain Khepri through a pun built into the language: the scarab beetle was written with the verb ḫpr, "to become, to come into being, to grow." So the beetle that seems to roll itself into being out of the earth became the natural image of the Sun renewing itself at dawn — and, by extension, of the dead person hoping to be reborn. Khepri is the morning pole of the Re cycle, set opposite Atum, the evening form.

In Practice

In the funerary books, Khepri is where the whole solar night-journey is heading. Re travels west to east beneath the earth through the Duat overnight, and rises at dawn reborn as Khepri — and that daily emergence is the very model for the rebirth a dead person hopes to share. In the *Book of the Dead*, Khepri sits in the sun-bark as "the scarab beetle who represents the morning sun," and the dead Ani identifies himself with "Re and Khepri, the sun at its rebirth at dawn." Because the scarab carried the verb "to become," it became a natural emblem for the heart-scarab amulet placed with the body — a worn wish for rebirth. At the close of the *Book of the Night* the nocturnal Sun is turned into a scarab as the sign of its coming dawn. When you see a scarab in a tomb or on a coffin, it is usually marking this morning-rebirth idea rather than the midday Sun.

Historical Origin

Khepri is attested across pharaonic religion and is prominent in the New Kingdom funerary literature. In the *Book of the Dead* he is named in the Chapter 17 sun-bark vignette and on the Chapter 30B heart-scarab amulet (Goelet, in Faulkner & Goelet, *The Egyptian Book of the Dead*, pp. 150-160) — Chapter 17 itself has a Middle Kingdom antecedent in Coffin Texts Spell 335. Hornung records Khepri as the scarab morning-form of the Sun in the Litany of Re and at the end of the *Book of the Night* (Hornung, *The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife*, p. 154).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading