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| Three conceptions of Ra the Egyptian sun god (3000BC), the theory that the sun is a fire disc, which is carried by a bird each day through the sky. |
, pronounced rah, meaning “mouth” (Ѻ), or "Re", "Helios" (Plutarch, 100AD), among other syncretized names, e.g. Ra-Atum (or Atum-Ra), or Amen-Ra, etc., is the sun or sun god, of Egyptian theology, that was said to have burst forth out of a land mound Nun following the chaos of beginning, and ascend into the sky bring the first light into the world, and being the progenitor to all life; he is often depicted as a falcon or falcon carrying the sun disc, or falcon-headed man (similar to the older god Horus). [1]“When writing the characters of their language, Egyptian scribes ignored vowels and recorded only the consonants. The phonetic ‘r’, for example, is represented by the hieroglyph, which is the ideogram of the human mouth. This one hieroglyph could represent a consonant as variably pronounced as ra, re, ar, er, and so forth.”
— Daniel Gunther (2015), “Thoughts on the 20th Anniversary Edition” in the Faulkner-translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (pg. 20)
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| A depiction of Ra (or possibly the Ba of Ra), from Chapter 151 of the Ani-version (1250BC) of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. [5] |
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“This name Abram or Abraham at once suggests the mythological nature of the history. It is one of the innumerable instances in which, in the ancient world, the sun, or a priest of the sun, was claimed to be the patriarch or first ruler or lawgiver of many nations. In Egypt ‘Ra’ was the Sun, and Osiris an incarnation of the Sun, was the first ruler there. Brahma was the first lawgiver of the Hindus, and there is little doubt that ‘Brahman’, as stated by Thompson, in his notes to the Bhagavad-Gita, was originally a name for the sun. This word ‘Ra’, meaning ‘bright’, is contained not only in the Egyptian mythological names connected with the sun, but a long list might be given, in which it appears in the names of all the sun heroes of all the Indo-Aryan languages, just as the cognate word ‘El’, ‘bright’, appears, in the same way, in the names of the Semitic sun heroes:– Amen-Ra-Pharaoh (the earthly manifested Sun-Ra); Indra (the Bright God Ra, who brings the rain drops); Sekra-Brahma-Rama-Varuna = Ouranos; MithraSurya-Ahura-Mazda ; Rudra-Ravi (the Sun) Saranyu (the Dawn). This list of sun heroes, with ‘Ra’ in their names, might be prolonged for pages, but it is unnecessary. A similar list of Semitic sun gods, with ‘El’ or ‘al’ in their names might also be made.”— Thomas Scott (1876), The Serpent in Mythology (pgs. 8-9) [6]
