Aker

About Aker

Aker is an ancient Egyptian earth-god, depicted as a pair of lions seated back to back or as a strip of land terminating at each end in a lion's head or forepart, who personifies the earth and guards the gateway between the world of the living and the duat through which the sun passes at dawn and dusk. The two lions face in opposite directions, toward the eastern and western horizons, and are sometimes named Sef ('Yesterday') and Duau ('Today' or 'Tomorrow'), embodying the passage of time across the threshold of the horizon. Between or upon the lions the sun-disk rises and sets, and Aker is the guardian of the gate through which the sun-god enters the underworld at sunset and emerges at dawn.

Aker is one of the oldest of the Egyptian earth-deities, attested in the Pyramid Texts (c. 2400–2300 BCE), where he appears as a chthonic power associated with the earth and the underworld, and in some early conceptions he precedes the more familiar earth-god Geb. As an earth-god, Aker embodies the ground itself and the depths beneath it, and his lions guard the entrance to the subterranean realm through which the sun travels by night. He is invoked in the funerary literature for protection against the dangers of the earth and the snakes that dwell in it, and he assists the dead and the sun-god in their passage through the underworld.

The twin-lion form is Aker's most distinctive feature. The image of two lions seated back to back, facing east and west, with the sun rising or setting between them, is one of the recurring cosmographic emblems of Egyptian art, expressing the double horizon — the eastern gate of dawn and the western gate of dusk — and the earth-god who guards both. The akhet or horizon hieroglyph, the sun-disk between two mountains or two lion-foreparts, is closely related to Aker's iconography, and the twin lions are sometimes shown supporting the horizon or the sky between them.

Aker plays a particular role in the Book of the Earth (also called the Book of Aker), a Late New Kingdom royal-tomb composition concerned with the chthonic phase of the sun's journey through the earth-god's body. In this and other Underworld Books, the sun passes through or over Aker as part of its nocturnal voyage, and the earth-god's body is the ground through which the solar barque travels in the depths of the night. Aker's cult was never a major temple cult of the kind enjoyed by the great gods; his role was chiefly cosmographic and funerary, his presence felt in the imagery of the tomb and the funerary literature rather than in a widespread worship. Yet his twin-lion form became one of the recurring emblems of Egyptian art, appearing on objects from headrests — where the twin lions guard the sleeper as Aker guards the horizon — to the walls of the royal tombs, and his role as guardian of the gates through which the sun and the dead pass made him a significant presence in the Egyptian conception of the cosmos and the afterlife. Joshua Roberson's The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth (2012) is the principal modern study of the Book of the Earth and of Aker's role in the chthonic cosmography of the Ramesside royal tombs.

The Story

The narrative of Aker is the story of the earth-god who guards the horizon gate and through whose body the sun passes in the depths of the night — a story told not as a connected myth but through the cosmographic images and funerary texts in which the twin-lion earth-god appears across Egyptian history.

Aker belongs to the deep stratum of Egyptian conceptions of the earth and the underworld. As an earth-god, he personifies the ground itself and the subterranean depths beneath it, the chthonic realm through which the sun travels by night and in which the dead are buried. In some early conceptions Aker precedes the more familiar earth-god Geb, and he stands among the oldest of the Egyptian deities, a primordial power of the earth invoked from the time of the Pyramid Texts.

The central image of Aker is the double horizon. The Egyptians imagined the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, passing each day from the visible world into the duat and back again, and the earth-god Aker, depicted as two lions seated back to back facing east and west, guards the gates through which the sun makes this passage. The eastern lion faces the gate of dawn, where the sun emerges reborn; the western lion faces the gate of dusk, where the sun descends into the underworld. Between them the sun-disk rises and sets, and Aker is the guardian of both thresholds, the earth-god who holds open the gates of the horizon for the passage of the sun.

The two lions are sometimes named Sef and Duau, 'Yesterday' and 'Today' or 'Tomorrow,' embodying the passage of time across the threshold of the horizon. The sun that sets in the west belongs to yesterday; the sun that rises in the east belongs to tomorrow; and Aker, facing both ways, spans the turning of time at the horizon, the earth-god through whom the days pass as the sun crosses his gates.

The lion-form of the earth-god carries its own logic in the story. The lion, a creature of power and danger associated with the desert margins and the guardianship of thresholds, was set at the entrances of temples and tombs as a protective figure, and the twin lions of Aker guard the most important of all thresholds, the gate between the world of the living and the duat. The doubling of the lion — two beasts seated back to back, one facing the rising sun and the other the setting — renders the double horizon in a single figure, and makes Aker the guardian who holds both gates at once, the eastern through which the sun is reborn and the western through which it descends into the dark.

In the funerary sphere, Aker assists and protects the dead and the sun-god in their passage through the underworld. As an earth-god, he commands the snakes and dangers of the earth, and the funerary texts invoke him for protection against these threats. The dead, buried in the earth that is Aker's body, pass through his domain on their way through the duat, and the earth-god's protection helps to secure their safe passage. Aker also assists the sun-god in his nocturnal voyage, the solar barque traveling through the earth-god's realm in the depths of the night. Because the earth was both the place of burial and the realm through which the sun journeyed by night, Aker stands at the meeting-point of the two great Egyptian concerns of the afterlife — the fate of the dead in the ground and the passage of the sun through the underworld — and his guardianship of the horizon gates serves both the deceased and the solar god alike.

The Book of the Earth, a Late New Kingdom royal-tomb composition also called the Book of Aker, gives the earth-god his fullest role. This composition is concerned with the chthonic phase of the sun's journey, the passage through the earth itself, and Aker's body is the ground through which the solar barque travels in the deepest part of the night. The sun passes into Aker's body in the west and emerges from it in the east, the earth-god's twin-lion form spanning the underworld through which the sun must travel to be reborn. The composition's cosmography, scattered across the walls of the Ramesside royal tombs, renders the chthonic depths of the solar journey with Aker at their center.

The narrative of Aker thus has no plot in the ordinary sense but a constant cosmographic role: the earth-god who guards the horizon gates, through whose body the sun passes by night, who spans the turning of time at the threshold of dawn and dusk, and who protects the dead and the sun-god in their passage through the earth. The image of the twin lions facing east and west, with the sun between them, is the enduring emblem of this role, one of the recurring cosmographic figures through which the Egyptians expressed the daily passage of the sun across the gates of the horizon and through the body of the earth.

Symbolism

Aker is among the most concentrated cosmographic symbols of Egyptian thought, condensing the earth, the horizon, the passage of the sun, and the turning of time into the single image of the twin lions. His primary symbolism is the double horizon: the two lions seated back to back, facing east and west, embody the two gates through which the sun passes each day, the eastern gate of dawn and the western gate of dusk. Aker is the earth-god who guards both thresholds, and his twin-lion form is the visible emblem of the daily passage of the sun across the horizon.

The lion as the form of the earth-god carries its own symbolism. The lion, a creature of power and danger associated with the desert margins and the guardianship of thresholds, is a fitting form for the guardian of the horizon gates. Lions were set at the entrances of temples and tombs as protective figures, and the twin lions of Aker guard the most important of all thresholds, the gate between the world of the living and the duat. The lion-form expresses the protective and guardian function of the earth-god, the powerful creature that holds the horizon gates against the dangers of the underworld.

The naming of the two lions as Sef and Duau, 'Yesterday' and 'Tomorrow,' adds the symbolism of time to that of space. The sun that sets belongs to the day that is past; the sun that rises belongs to the day to come; and Aker, facing both ways, spans the turning of time at the horizon. The earth-god embodies the threshold not only between the world and the underworld but between yesterday and tomorrow, the point at which time turns as the sun passes from one day to the next. The twin lions are the guardians of this temporal as well as spatial threshold.

As an earth-god, Aker symbolizes the ground and the depths beneath it, the chthonic realm of burial and the underworld. His body is the earth through which the dead are buried and through which the sun passes by night, and his command of the snakes and dangers of the earth makes him both a threat to be propitiated and a protector to be invoked. The earth-symbolism of Aker connects him to the whole Egyptian conception of the subterranean realm, the duat that lies beneath the earth and through which the sun and the dead must travel.

The passage of the sun through Aker's body, central to the Book of the Earth, symbolizes the chthonic phase of the solar journey, the descent of the sun into the depths of the earth and its emergence reborn. The sun that enters Aker's body in the west and emerges in the east passes through the earth itself, the earth-god's twin-lion form spanning the underworld through which the sun travels to be renewed. This symbolism makes Aker the embodiment of the ground through which the sun must pass, the chthonic depth at the heart of the nocturnal voyage.

The akhet or horizon hieroglyph, the sun-disk between two mountains or two lion-foreparts, is the symbolic kin of Aker's iconography. The horizon, the akhet, was for the Egyptians a place of transformation and transition, the threshold where the sun is reborn and where the dead are transfigured, and Aker, guarding the horizon gates, is the earth-god of this liminal zone. The twin lions supporting the sun or the horizon between them render the akhet as a living guardian, the earth-god who holds open the gate of transformation for the passage of the sun and the renewal of the world.

Cultural Context

Aker belongs to the ancient stratum of Egyptian earth-deities and cosmographic conceptions, attested from the Pyramid Texts and persisting throughout pharaonic history. As one of the oldest of the Egyptian earth-gods, he reflects the early Egyptian conception of the earth as a living divine power, the ground itself personified as a deity who guards the gates of the horizon and commands the depths beneath the surface. His antiquity places him among the primordial powers of the Egyptian cosmos, and in some early conceptions he precedes the more familiar earth-god Geb.

The cult of Aker, never a major temple cult of the kind enjoyed by the great gods, was chiefly cosmographic and funerary. Aker appears not as the object of a widespread cult but as a figure in the funerary literature and in the cosmographic imagery of the tomb, where his role as guardian of the horizon gates and as the earth through which the sun and the dead pass made him a significant presence in the conception of the afterlife. His invocation for protection against the snakes and dangers of the earth connects him to the apotropaic and protective dimension of Egyptian funerary religion.

The twin-lion iconography of Aker is one of the recurring cosmographic emblems of Egyptian art, expressing the double horizon and the earth-god who guards it. The image of two lions seated back to back, facing east and west, with the sun rising or setting between them, appears across the whole span of Egyptian art, on objects ranging from headrests — where the twin lions guard the sleeper as Aker guards the horizon — to the walls of the royal tombs. The relationship of this iconography to the akhet or horizon hieroglyph, the sun-disk between two mountains or lion-foreparts, ties Aker to the central Egyptian conception of the horizon as a place of transformation.

Aker's role in the Book of the Earth places him at the center of the chthonic cosmography of the Ramesside royal tombs. This Late New Kingdom composition, concerned with the passage of the sun through the earth itself, gives Aker his fullest development as the earth-god through whose body the solar barque travels in the depths of the night. The composition belongs to the great flowering of royal funerary cosmography in the Ramesside period, when the tombs of the kings were decorated with elaborate Underworld Books — the Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and the Book of the Earth — that rendered the regions of the night and the journey of the sun in unprecedented detail.

The association of Aker with the passage of time, through the naming of his two lions as Sef and Duau, 'Yesterday' and 'Tomorrow,' connects the earth-god to the Egyptian conception of time and its turning at the horizon. The sun's daily passage across the gates of the horizon, from the day that is past to the day to come, made the horizon a temporal as well as a spatial threshold, and Aker, facing both ways, embodied the turning of time at this threshold. This temporal symbolism ties Aker to the broader Egyptian conceptions of cyclical time and the daily renewal of the sun.

Aker thus occupies a distinctive place in the cultural and religious world of ancient Egypt, an ancient earth-god whose role was chiefly cosmographic and funerary rather than cultic, whose twin-lion form became one of the recurring emblems of Egyptian art, and who guarded the gates of the horizon through which the sun and the dead passed between the world of the living and the duat. His study, founded on the modern editions of the Book of the Earth and the Underworld Books, illuminates the Egyptian conception of the earth, the horizon, and the chthonic phase of the solar journey.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

Aker guards the horizon — the threshold where the sun passes from the visible world into the hidden underworld and back. This figure, facing both ways at the edge of time and space, is one of the oldest responses to a structural question: what entity or principle governs the transition between day and night, living world and dead, yesterday and tomorrow? Other traditions answered with different figures, and the differences reveal distinct assumptions about what a threshold is and who should keep it.

Roman — Janus and the Double-Faced Threshold God (Ovid, Fasti 1.89–288, c. 8 CE; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.9)

Janus, the Roman deity of doorways and beginnings, is depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. The Janus Geminus, Rome's oldest gate, stood open in war and closed in peace. The parallel with Aker's twin-lion form facing east and west is genuine: both embody the double-facing of the threshold guardian, looking toward what comes and what has gone. The divergence is in domain. Aker is a cosmic and chthonic guardian — his gates are the horizon through which the sun passes between day and night. Janus governs human doorways, the month of January, war and peace. Aker faces the cosmic east and west; Janus faces the human past and future. Same double-facing, different scale.

Norse — Jörmungandr at the Edge of the Sea (Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, c. 1220 CE)

The Midgard Serpent encircles the world, tail in its own mouth, lying at the boundary between Midgard and the ocean beyond. Like Aker, it marks and embodies the outer edge of the ordered cosmos — but where Aker guards the passage through the boundary, Jörmungandr is the boundary itself, a living seal rather than a gateway. Aker holds the horizon open for the sun's daily transit; the Midgard Serpent holds the world closed against the chaos outside it. The Egyptian boundary figure is permeable and functional; the Norse boundary creature is sealed and apocalyptic — the world ends when the serpent releases its hold.

Mesopotamian — Nergal as Ruler of the Underworld (Descent of Inanna, c. 1800 BCE; Nergal and Ereshkigal, c. 1400 BCE)

Nergal rules the Mesopotamian underworld as its king, governing who enters. Like Aker, he stands at the threshold between the living world and the dead. The structural contrast is illuminating: Nergal is a monarch of the whole underworld. Aker is a guardian of the transition point itself, a function distributed at the horizon rather than a lord concentrated at the top. The Mesopotamian underworld concentrated its power in a ruling pair; the Egyptian underworld distributed threshold power across the horizon's two gates and the twelve divisions beyond.

Japanese — Izanami and the Boulder of Yomi (Kojiki, 712 CE)

After seeing Izanami's decaying form, Izanagi rolls a great boulder across the entrance to Yomi, permanently sealing the worlds of the living and the dead from one another. Aker's gates are meant to be traversed: the sun passes through them every night and every day, and their guardianship is functional precisely because passage is permitted and regular. Izanami's boulder enforces an absolute, permanent separation — not a threshold but a wall. The Egyptian horizon is a regular crossing maintained by an earth-god facing both ways; the Japanese underworld entrance is a one-time sealing that fixed mortality as the permanent condition of the world.

Modern Influence

Aker entered modern awareness through the study of the Egyptian Underworld Books and the cosmographic imagery of the royal tombs, where the twin-lion earth-god appears as a guardian of the horizon and as the earth through which the sun passes. The distinctive image of the two lions seated back to back, with the sun-disk between them, was recognized early as one of the recurring emblems of Egyptian cosmography, and Aker took his place among the Egyptian deities documented and catalogued by the scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The scholarly understanding of Aker's role in the chthonic cosmography of the royal tombs was deepened by the study of the Book of the Earth, the Late New Kingdom composition in which the earth-god figures most prominently. Joshua Roberson's The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth (2012) provided the principal modern critical edition and analysis of this composition, establishing Aker's place in the chthonic phase of the solar journey and the cosmography of the Ramesside royal tombs. Erik Hornung's broader work on the Underworld Books situated Aker within the whole genre of royal funerary cosmography.

The twin-lion iconography of Aker has been recognized in a range of Egyptian objects beyond the royal tombs, including the headrests on which the twin lions guard the sleeper as Aker guards the horizon, and the relationship of the iconography to the akhet or horizon hieroglyph has been a subject of iconographic study. The image of the two lions with the sun between them stays among the recognizable cosmographic emblems of Egyptian art, reproduced in studies of Egyptian symbolism and in museum displays of Egyptian funerary objects.

Aker has had a modest afterlife in modern popular culture and in the broader reception of Egyptian mythology, where the twin-lion earth-god appears among the cast of Egyptian deities reimagined in fiction, games, and popular accounts of Egyptian myth. Though less prominent than the great gods, Aker's striking twin-lion form and his role as guardian of the gates of the horizon have given him a recognizable presence in the modern repertoire of Egyptian mythological figures, and the image of the two lions facing east and west continues to evoke the Egyptian conception of the horizon and the passage of the sun.

The association of Aker with the passage of time, through the naming of his two lions as 'Yesterday' and 'Tomorrow,' has attracted attention in discussions of the Egyptian conception of time and its turning at the horizon. The earth-god who faces both ways, spanning the threshold between the day that is past and the day to come, has been cited as a striking image of the Egyptian understanding of cyclical time and the daily renewal of the sun, and the twin-lion form as an emblem of the turning of time at the horizon.

In the academic study of comparative mythology and the history of religion, Aker is cited as an example of the personification of the earth as a divine guardian and of the leonine guardian of thresholds, a figure with parallels in the lion-guardians of other ancient cultures. The Egyptian conception of the earth-god who guards the gates of the horizon, through whose body the sun passes by night, and who spans the turning of time at the threshold of dawn and dusk, remains a distinctive expression of the cosmographic imagination of ancient Egypt.

Primary Sources

Aker is attested from the Pyramid Texts (c. 2350–2180 BCE), the oldest surviving Egyptian religious corpus. Utterance 255 (Sethe § 305) addresses 'Aker, the double lion,' and Utterance 313 (§ 506) describes the earth-god in the context of the dead king's passage. The Pyramid Texts establish Aker's role as an earth-deity associated with the subterranean realm and the passage of the dead, and his twin-lion iconography is already implied in these references. Edition: Kurt Sethe, *Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte*, 4 vols (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1908–22); English translations: R.O. Faulkner, *The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) and James P. Allen, *The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts* (SBL Writings from the Ancient World 23, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005).

Aker appears in the Coffin Texts (c. 2100–1700 BCE) in the context of protection against the snakes and dangers of the earth. Coffin Text Spell 30 invokes Aker for protection against serpents in the ground; other spells invoke him as a power of the earth that the deceased must pass. Edition: Adriaan de Buck, *The Egyptian Coffin Texts*, 7 vols (Oriental Institute Publications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935–61); translation: R.O. Faulkner, *The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts*, 3 vols (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1973–78).

Aker's most developed role is in the Book of the Earth (also called the Book of Aker), a Late New Kingdom royal-tomb composition found principally in the tombs of Ramesses VI (KV9) and Ramesses VII in the Valley of the Kings, dating to c. 1143–1135 BCE. In this composition the earth-god's body is the ground through which the solar barque travels in the depths of the night, the sun entering through the western gate and emerging through the eastern gate reborn. The standard modern edition and analysis is Joshua Aaron Roberson, *The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth* (Wilbour Studies in Egypt and Ancient Western Asia 1, Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2012), which provides hieroglyphic texts, translation, and detailed commentary on the composition and Aker's role within it.

The twin-lion iconography of Aker — the double-lion form facing east and west with the sun-disk between them — appears on objects across the whole span of Egyptian material culture, from Middle Kingdom headrests to the walls of the New Kingdom royal tombs. The iconographic context and the relationship of the twin-lion form to the akhet (horizon) hieroglyph are analyzed in Erik Hornung, *The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), and in Richard H. Wilkinson, *Reading Egyptian Art* (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992) and *The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt* (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003).

Significance

Aker holds a significant place in the Egyptian conception of the cosmos as the earth-god who guards the gates of the horizon, through whose body the sun passes by night, and who spans the turning of time at the threshold of dawn and dusk. As one of the oldest of the Egyptian earth-deities, attested from the Pyramid Texts and in some conceptions preceding Geb, he reflects the early Egyptian personification of the earth as a living divine power and a guardian of the thresholds of the cosmos.

His significance lies above all in his cosmographic role. Aker guards the double horizon, the eastern gate of dawn and the western gate of dusk through which the sun passes each day between the world of the living and the duat, and his twin-lion form is one of the recurring emblems of Egyptian cosmography. The image of the two lions facing east and west, with the sun between them, condenses the daily passage of the sun across the gates of the horizon into a single figure, and makes Aker the guardian of the most important of all thresholds.

Aker is significant for the chthonic phase of the solar journey, the passage of the sun through the earth itself in the depths of the night. In the Book of the Earth, the earth-god's body is the ground through which the solar barque travels, and Aker is the embodiment of the chthonic depth at the heart of the nocturnal voyage. His role in the Ramesside royal tombs makes him part of the elaborate cosmography of the night that the Underworld Books render, and a key figure in the Egyptian conception of the sun's passage through the earth.

The earth-god is also significant for the Egyptian conception of time and its turning at the horizon. The naming of his two lions as Sef and Duau, 'Yesterday' and 'Tomorrow,' ties Aker to the daily renewal of the sun and the cyclical turning of time, the earth-god who faces both ways and spans the threshold between the day that is past and the day to come. This temporal symbolism connects Aker to the broader Egyptian conceptions of cyclical time and the perpetual renewal of the cosmos.

For the modern study of Egyptian religion, Aker is significant as a witness to the Egyptian personification of the earth, to the conception of the horizon as a place of transformation and transition, and to the chthonic cosmography of the solar journey. His twin-lion form, his role as guardian of the horizon gates, and his association with the passage of time make him a distinctive figure in the Egyptian pantheon and a window onto the cosmographic imagination through which the Egyptians understood the earth, the horizon, and the daily passage of the sun.

Connections

Geb, the earth-god of the Heliopolitan Ennead, is the more familiar Egyptian personification of the earth, and the relationship between Geb and Aker illuminates the Egyptian conception of the earth as a divine power. The two earth-gods embody different aspects of the earth, Geb the cultivated ground and Aker the chthonic depths and the guardian of the horizon gates.

The Ra entry addresses the sun-god who passes through Aker's gates and body in his daily and nightly journey, entering the underworld through the western gate at dusk and emerging through the eastern gate at dawn. Aker is the guardian of the thresholds through which the sun makes its eternal passage.

The Duat is the underworld through which the sun and the dead pass, the chthonic realm that Aker, as earth-god, embodies and guards. The earth-god's body is the ground through which the solar barque travels in the depths of the night, and his gates are the thresholds between the world of the living and the duat.

The bark of Ra travels through Aker's body in the chthonic phase of the solar journey, as rendered in the Book of the Earth. The sun's passage through the earth-god's realm in the depths of the night is part of the nocturnal voyage of the bark, and Aker is the earth through which it travels.

The Amduat and the Book of Gates are the New Kingdom Underworld Books that, alongside the Book of the Earth, render the regions of the night and the journey of the sun. Aker appears in the cosmography of these compositions as the earth-god of the chthonic depths through which the sun passes.

The Sphinx, the great lion-bodied guardian of Giza identified with Horus-in-the-Horizon, shares with Aker the lion-form and the association with the horizon. Both are leonine guardians of the threshold where the sun rises, and the Sphinx's identification with the horizon connects it to Aker's cosmographic world.

The chaos-serpent Apep and the snakes and dangers of the earth that Aker commands tie the earth-god to the apotropaic dimension of Egyptian funerary religion. Aker is invoked for protection against the perils of the ground, and his role as guardian of the horizon gates connects him to the whole Egyptian conception of the dangers and transformations of the underworld through which the sun and the dead pass.

The principle of kheper and the scarab-god Khepri, the self-renewing sun reborn at the eastern horizon, are the culmination of the passage through Aker's eastern gate. The sun that descends through the western gate at dusk and travels through the earth-god's body emerges renewed at dawn through the eastern gate, the daily rebirth that Aker, guardian of the horizon, makes possible.

Further Reading