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.

Where you can find information about Egypt

Perhaps you wonder where I find all the information I use. Here the solution to your question is.
Nowadays, Egyptian culture is a topic which a lot of people are interested in. Maybe this happens because of the misteries related with the discoveries of Tutankamon´s tomb, the magic language Egyptians used (the hieroglyphs) or the famous mythology represented in wonderful statues.
Anyway, the information I use you can find it by surfing the net, in books or in specialized magazines. Here my own sources go:


Books about Egypt

Big Universal History, Francisco José Presedo 2005. This is a collection of books from Prehistory to Contemporary age. I use the third volume to do my posts. Here, Egyptian History is related from the begginnig of the Predinastic Egypt, as well as other topics like emperors and their wives, pharaohs and Egyptian gods.

Magazines

History National Geographic. April 2009. How did women come to the throne? This volumen tells about the life of the pharaoh Hatshepsut and other pharaohs.
I am also going to use other volumes to talk about gods like number 66 and 69.
Revista Egipto. I use this magazine not to look for good articles but for some of the Egyptian culture now and before. There are articles about modern and ancient archaeology too.

Internet

Finally, you can find good information in the net. These are my favourite web pages:

• Blogs like: Blog de Egipto, Egyptian Culture
• Webs: History of Egypt ,Egyptian Gods, The famous Wikipedia...and all the pages about Egypt that I can find.

I hope this information help you to find more about Ancient Egypt!

Good Companies, Bad Sources

Despite I know that what I do is not so fair or right, I have to confess that I'm using just a source of information. And I also know that it's not so reliable, but my source is the Wikipedia

It's been called "The free encyclopedia"; anyone can publish anything in it, about any topic he or she wants. For some people this is enough to criticize it, because some specialist have lost their information power. I trust this freeclopedia, because I know that if you write something really mad, it's controlled so that will be removed. What most people do is to translate information from other languages and then just post it. That's also a good idea, because it makes information reachable to anyone, wherever he or she is from.

As I've said, this is my only source, but when I'll want to do something more relevant, or get more specific information, I'll go to google and just write what I want to know, then, I'll get the information from the results of the search.

I usually look for the information in spanish, and then translate it, because it would be so easy to copy and to stick it. It was a good method in the high school, but here, in university, teachers want us to write which are our sources, so it's not possible to try to cheat.

When my sources won't be enough, I'll ask my father to bring me some books, because he works as a book seller for an important company.

I hope that this sources will be enough, but anyway, I'll write after each post what have been the sources employed. And I also hope that the exit of the blog will depend on my mates, not much on me!

My sources

This are some of the sources that I use to prepare my posts about Egypt. I am only going to talk about four of them, but in every post I write I surf the net and look for information from much more places and contrast it. Anyway my main sources are three books that I took from my town´s library, which titles are "A orillas del Nilo" written by Edda Bresciani, "El antiguo Egipto", written by Barry J.Kemp and "Egipto: dioses, templos y faraones " whose authors are John Banes and Jaromir Malek. All these writers are egyptologists.

About my Internet sources I sometimes use wikipedia. I know it´s not a speciallised source but I only use that information when I am completely sure that what it´s witten in there is true.I use it because there is a lot of information which is normally true and written in a plain English.I also like it because I can get the same information in Spanish in case I don´t understand it in English and because it´s easy to use.
Another one of my sources is a webpage called Ancient Egypt. I like this page because it´s a good source for many different topcis about the egyptian civilitation. It´s really well organised and there are many images which help me understanding better all this amazing culture.In there I can find information about gods, art, egyptian life, mummification and so on. There is where I found some good information for the second post that I will publish about God Ra.

At last, a blog where I can find information about this is, is called egiptologia . I still haven´t used it but I have read some of the information on it and I like it because the writer is not writing about personal experiences, he´s objective and talks about the Ancient Egypt.I don´t like the other blogs that I have found about Egypt because most of them only speak about travelling nowadays to this country.
I have also used a forum where four different people discuss mainly about God Ra.I think they know what they are talking about and it looks like they are really interested on the topic.Most of the information given in the forum is true and I know it because I have compared it with many other texts. It´s name is egiptomaniacos

Introduction

As I had said, we'll speak about Egypt's culture, but this ancient civilization's culture is huge, so, I'll take my favourite part: Music. In my next post I'll talk about egyptian's music, their way of transmiting it, their instruments...

But that topic is not so large, so after that post I'll talk about some other aspects of their culture.

Anyway, in each post I'll put an url and some information about some famous music bands which have something to do with Egypt: songs, albums or...whatever.

I'll also add some photos, because a picture is thousand words, and I know that just reading is a bit boring. I still don't know how to put them, so you'll have to wait until next post to see media here.

I hope you'll like our blog and my work.

My introduction

My name is Nora Franco and I´m studying advertising and public relations at the University of Navarra. We´ve created this blog because we have to write about a topic for the subject of multimedia communication. For this reason we´ve choosen: "The egyptian culture". We have thought that the content of this blog should be interesting for all the members of the group and we agree. At the beggining my mates suggested other tematic approachs but finally we´ve decided that it iwill be the best for us. We hope that you comment our posts and enjoy them.

I always have been curious about the egyptians.I have watched a lot of documentaries and I´ve read a lot about Egypt. One of the most exciting aspects of the egyptian culture for me is: "The death and it meaning" and of course the world-famous pyramids! I´ll try to tell you all that I have researched related to this aspect.

With regard to my topic, I would like to recommend you a web that can help you to know a little more about this fantastic culture: Egypt Culture. Moreover it´s very useful if you want to travel to Egypt. Please! click here You won´t regret it!

Introducing myself

My name is Raquel Echeverria. I am a student of first course of advertising and public relations at the University of Navarra. My multimedia communication teacher told me I had to create a personal blog and then join a group in order to create a thematic blog.
I´ve already found three people who are going to colaborate with me at this weblog, and the topic we have chosen is egyptian culture.
The reason why we have chosen this temmatic approach is that we are very different to each other and we don´t like the same kind of music or sport. I thought about something which could be nice for everybody and my first idea was mithology. When I suggested the idea to the rest of the group they told me they liked egyptian culture, so we decided to create a blog about that topic. We are not going to publish anything about it yet, but we´ll do it soon and we hope you will like it.

This is me, a new writer of the blog.

I am Ohiane Iriarte and I am going to colaborate on this blog. I am studying Media in the University of Navarra and this is a work for the Multimedia subject, but I am glad to write on this site.

After some minutes discussing with my mates we have decided that Egyptian Culture can be a good theme for our blog. We are really different, so choosing a topic enjoyed by all of us is a hard work. Finally we have thought that talking about an ancient culture could be interesting because we can write about different branches such as music, art, architecture...

I started to read books about the Egyptian culture since I was 14. My sister was obsessed with this art and I think she transmitted me her emotion. I love reading things about the Egyptian writing and overall the mythology, my favourite gods are Bastet (the divinity godness who had a woman body and a cat head) and Isis.

In my posts, I will try to talk about hieroglyphs, some of the ancient Egyptian art and about the gods and pharaohs as Tutankamon and Ramsés.

The photo represents a pharao´s tomb, my sister took it for me from the Vatican Museum

I hope you enjoy all my posts.

First Post in the new team blog!

After more than an hour in front of the computer, we've been able to create a team blog, and it's time to post before we leave.

My name's Beñat, and despite I'm not so happy with the subject my mates have chosen (egyptian culture) I'll try to do my part well. I'm not saying I hate the subject, but I'd just prefer music. So, I'll try to relation Egiptians with music (as well as I can), to feel satisfied with myself, and to make my mates feel well with my work. Anyway, I hope that this work won't be so hard, and that it will be even fun, because otherwise, I'll have to say that I've chosen a wrong subject.

Seriously, I think we've taken a good decission. I'm looking forward to start posting weekly.