God Ra

The god Ra or Re was for the ancient egyptian civilization the God of heaven, power and light, but especially he was the god of Sun.




He was representated with a human body and a hawk head which holded a solar disc, but he could also be representated with his animal body by a hawk, a sheep, a grasshopper, a cat or a bull.
As a grasshopper he was the representation of god Ra full of hapiness. With his grasshopper aspect, he was the symbol of fertility and at last, in his bull aspect, he symbolized the fertility of the fields.
As a sculpture, he was representated with gold, which is also known as god´s body

Click here to see god´s names written in hyeroglyphic.



The city where the worship to god Ra took place was specially Heliopolis, also known as Iunu. The greek name, Heliópolis, meant `city of Sun´ while the egyptian name, Iunu, meant
` support´.


Ra was for hundreds of years the most important god of the egyptian religion. His power was completely established around 2400 B.C, with the fourth dinasty of pharaons. Since that moment, all the pharaons started to call themselves Sons of Ra. The first one to get his name was pharaon Radyedef. They liked being called Son of Ra followed by the first letter of their real name. For example pharaon Micerino´s name was Son of Ra, M.

Ra was since this period of the egyptian civilization the father of the rests of the gods. There are many discussions about this topic because many years later, Ra was also identified with other gods like Osiris, the god of death and renaissance, or Amón which was an ancient boss of Thebes.
But as a general information Ra was the father of the rests of the gods, the creator of everyting which existed on earth, and even father of human who were created from his tears.

Another curiosity about this anciend god is the fact that Ra wasn´t his real name. Knowing the real name of egyptian gods was impossible because the person who knew it had the same powers as the god. That´s why their real names were top secret and nobody could ever know them.

There is a famous legend about this which says that Ra´s daughter, Isis, made a mud snake which bit Ra. He was really hurt and asked his daughter for help. She said she would make the pain stop wether she could know Ra´s real name. Ra agreed and he whispered his name to her, so she got her father´s powers.

To finish with this post I´m going to write about another mitological story about this god. It is said thar Ra crosses the sky during the day on a boat and he travels at night on a different one.



In his trip he has three different appearances: at dawn he was Jepri, at midday he was Horajty and at the sunset he was Atum. During the day Ra gets old but every morning, after killing the damaging snake Apofis which tries to stop his advance through the sky Ra appeares young once again.