Frog (from Portuguese Re) is the egyptian god of the sun being the main deity of the Egyptian religion. The cult of the Sun God was very prosperous in Egypt, being the main form of worship and an official cult for about twenty centuries.
The deities are generally linked to natural phenomena, and, due to the light in the cultivation of food, the ancient Egyptians attributed to Ra great importance.
In addition to being the central deity of the Egyptian pantheon, Ra is also a primordial god and creator of the gods and divine order, along with his wife, the Goddess Ret (whose name is the female version of the name Re and can be the same deity) originated the genealogy: Shu and Tefnut, Geb and Nut, Osiris, Seth, Isis and Nephthys.
Over time, this deity was associated with other gods such as Horus, Sobek (Sobek-Re), Amon (Amon-Re) and Khnum (Khnum-Re) and its existence is closely linked to royalty, as Ra would have lived in Heliopolis and ruled Egypt even before the historical dynasties, of which the pharaohs would be his descendants.
Representation of Ra
Illustration of the God Ra
Ra, the Sun God was commonly represented by the midday sun and had the obelisk as an insignia, which was considered a ray of the petrified sun. In its animal form, it could be transmuted into a falcon, lion, cat, or Benu bird.
Note that the Sun God had four phases: the first at sunrise, the second at noon, the third at sunset, and the fourth phase at night. However, the main phase is at midday, when he is represented by a bird, commonly the falcon.
Ra and Creation
According to Egyptian mythology, all life forms were created by Ra by pronouncing their secret names.
Other versions also claim that humans would have been created from the tears and sweat of Ra, who had become so exhausted by the work of creation assigned to him by his father Nun, who wept, and from his tears man and the women.
The Syncretisms of Ra
The city of Lunu was the center of the cult of Ra, located in the north of the country. Later the Greeks named that city as Heliopolis ("city of the sun") and there reigned the local sun god, Atum, hence the fusion Tuna-Ra.
It is worth noting that Heliopolis was a great commercial center in Lower Egypt and its priests had great prestige, which led the pharaohs of Thebes to adopt Amon as the supreme god.
Then comes a new merger, this time called Amon-Ra, protector of the pharaohs. Thus, the god Amon became the prominent deity of the pantheon, as the Amon-Ra superposition basically means sun worship (Amon = cult and Ra = sun).
Another well-known syncretism is that of Frog and Horus, which can be seen in the representations associated with the falcon or the hawk, since, when depicted with a falcon-headed, an identity was established with Horus, another sun god worshiped in earlier periods in the Egypt.
To complement your research, see also the articles:
- Ancient Egypt
- Egyptian Civilization
- Egyptian art
- Egyptian gods
- Phoenix
