Nun (Primeval Waters)

Definition

Nun (Egyptian Nww, sometimes spelled Nu) is the boundless dark water that the Egyptians imagined existed before anything else — before the sky, the earth, or the gods. It is not empty chaos but a still, silent, lightless ocean holding everything not yet come to be. Out of it the creator-god and the first dry land rose. Even after the world was made, Egyptians pictured Nun still surrounding the cosmos above the sky and below the earth. Nun is also personified as a god of the same name.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read Nun as the pre-creation state of the universe rather than a destructive void. Belmonte and Lull stress, following Assmann, that it is closer to an "embryonic" fullness — a propitious space of regeneration — than to the Greek idea of chaos. Each regional creation story (Heliopolis, Memphis, Thebes) has its creator emerge from these waters, so Nun is the shared starting point of Egyptian cosmology.

In Practice

In Egyptian sky-religion, Nun frames the whole star-vault from the outside. The Sun is born from it at dawn and sinks back toward it at dusk: in the Book of the Dead the aged Sun travels at night immersed in Nun and emerges reborn as Khepri, the morning Sun. Goelet notes that Nun was sometimes called the Abyss for its bottomless quality and was even written with an upside-down "sky" sign, marking it as a watery counterpart of the sky overhead. Egyptians also met Nun in everyday life — the groundwater seeping up during temple-foundation digging, and the annual Nile flood, were both felt as the primeval waters returning. So when a text or ceiling shows the cosmos held apart from the surrounding deep, Nun is the deep it is held back from.

Historical Origin

Nun is attested from the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts onward and runs through the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. In Chapter 17 of the Papyrus of Ani the deceased declares, "I was Atum when I was alone in the Primordial Waters" (trans. Faulkner). It is treated in Belmonte & Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt (2018), and in Goelet's commentary to Faulkner, The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Further Reading

• Juan Antonio Belmonte & José Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt
• Raymond O. Faulkner & Ogden Goelet, The Egyptian Book of the Dead