Destruction of Mankind

About Destruction of Mankind

The Destruction of Mankind is an Egyptian mythological narrative preserved in the first section of the Book of the Heavenly Cow, a New Kingdom composition inscribed on the walls of royal tombs beginning with the outermost shrine of Tutankhamun (KV62, c. 1325 BCE) and most completely in the tomb of Seti I (KV17, c. 1290 BCE). Additional copies survive in the tombs of Ramesses II, Ramesses III, and Ramesses VI, all in the Valley of the Kings. The text recounts the crisis that ends Ra's direct earthly kingship: humanity's rebellion against the aging sun-god, his dispatch of his fiery Eye — in the form of Hathor transformed into Sekhmet — to destroy the rebels, his change of heart, and the stratagem by which seven thousand jars of beer dyed red with ochre trick the bloodthirsty goddess into drunken sleep, sparing the remnant of humanity.

The narrative occupies a pivotal position in Egyptian theology because it explains three cosmological transitions simultaneously: why the gods withdrew from direct rule over the earth, why the relationship between Ra and humanity changed from immediate presence to mediated worship, and how the annual festival of drunkenness (the Tekh festival at Dendera and elsewhere) originated as a liturgical commemoration of humanity's salvation through intoxication. Erik Hornung's translation in Der aegyptische Mythos von der Himmelskuh (1982, English adaptation in The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, 1999) remains the standard scholarly edition.

The myth's theological function extends beyond aetiology. It addresses a central paradox of Egyptian religion: how a benevolent creator-god can rule a world that contains suffering, disorder, and death. Ra's decision to destroy humanity is not arbitrary cruelty but a response to genuine rebellion — humans conspired against an aging, weakening god. His subsequent decision to spare them is not sentimental mercy but pragmatic statecraft: total annihilation would leave no worshippers. The myth thus negotiates the gap between divine omnipotence and human survival with a characteristically Egyptian solution — trickery, not theology.

The composition's literary structure reveals deliberate artistry. The opening section describing Ra's aging and the council of the gods follows the pattern of royal audience scenes in Egyptian temple art, transposing earthly governance into the divine realm. The central section — the destruction and its reversal — employs rapid narrative pacing unusual in Egyptian mythological texts, moving from council to slaughter to salvation within a compressed temporal frame. The concluding cosmological sections expand outward from the personal (Ra's weariness) to the universal (the restructuring of heaven and earth), creating a narrative arc that transforms a domestic crisis among gods into a comprehensive account of why the world looks the way it does.

The myth's preservation exclusively in royal tombs, rather than in temple inscriptions or funerary papyri, connects it to the ideology of the pharaonic afterlife. The king who lies in the decorated tomb participates in Ra's cosmic drama — his own death and resurrection mirror Ra's withdrawal from earth and continued sovereignty from the sky. The Book of the Heavenly Cow thus functions as a charter for the royal afterlife: the king follows Ra's path from earthly ruler to cosmic sovereign, withdrawing from the human world not through defeat but through transcendence.

The Story

The narrative opens with Ra aged and diminished, his bones turned to silver, his flesh to gold, his hair to lapis lazuli. He rules the earth in the company of gods and humans, but his authority is crumbling. Humans have begun to plot against him, whispering rebellion in the desert margins beyond the Nile Valley. Ra perceives their conspiracy and summons a secret council of the oldest gods — Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, and the primordial waters Nun — to advise him. He does not wish the humans to know of the council before he acts, fearing they will flee.

Nun, the eldest of the gods and the personification of the pre-creation waters, advises Ra to send his Eye against humanity. The Eye of Ra — the sun-god's fiery, feminine extension, which can operate independently as a goddess — is dispatched in the form of Hathor. She descends upon the rebels in the desert and begins the slaughter. The text describes her wading through human blood with savage joy: 'It was pleasing to my heart,' she declares upon returning to Ra after her first day of killing. Ra sees the carnage and recognizes that she has become Sekhmet, the lioness of destruction whose bloodlust, once kindled, cannot be quenched by command.

Ra changes his mind. The text gives no explicit motivation — whether mercy, pragmatism, or simply the recognition that a world without worshippers is pointless — but he decides to save the remnant. Yet Sekhmet cannot be ordered to stop. She has tasted blood and intends to finish the work at dawn. Ra must resort to stratagem.

He dispatches swift messengers south to Elephantine to gather red ochre (didi). Meanwhile, he commands the high priest of Ra at Heliopolis to brew seven thousand jars of beer. The serving-women of the palace grind the ochre and mix it into the beer until it resembles human blood. Working through the night, Ra's servants pour the seven thousand jars across the fields where Sekhmet will hunt at sunrise. The beer floods the landscape to a depth of three palm-widths.

At dawn, Sekhmet arrives at the killing fields. She sees the blood-red liquid and, delighted, begins to drink. The beer is strong — Egyptian beer was thick and nutritious, a staple food as much as a beverage — and she drinks until she can no longer recognize the humans around her. She returns to Ra drunk, placated, and transformed back into Hathor the beautiful. 'Welcome in peace, O beauty,' Ra greets her. The text explicitly connects this episode to the annual Tekh festival (Festival of Drunkenness), celebrated especially at Dendera in honor of Hathor, during which ritual intoxication commemorated humanity's deliverance.

But the crisis has consequences. Ra declares that he is weary of ruling the earth and will withdraw from direct governance. He mounts the back of Nut, who transforms into the celestial cow, and ascends to the sky. From this point forward, Ra will traverse the heavens in his solar bark rather than walking among humans. He appoints Thoth as his deputy on earth — 'You shall be in my place, my substitute' — giving Thoth dominion over the moon and the night, since Ra will rule only the day. The text also describes Geb's succession as ruler of the earthly domain, completing the transfer of power from the solar god to the terrestrial order.

The narrative's later sections (which form the remainder of the Book of the Heavenly Cow) describe the cosmological restructuring that follows Ra's withdrawal: the establishment of the sky as Nut's arched body, the creation of the celestial geography through which Ra's bark will travel, and the appointment of Shu to support Nut's body — the origin of the atmospheric space between earth and sky. These sections transform the myth from a simple punishment narrative into a comprehensive cosmogonic account of the world's present structure.

The text also describes the creation of specific features of the afterlife landscape. Ra populates the duat with serpents and protective beings, creates the 'Field of Reeds' and the 'Field of Offerings' as the posthumous dwelling places of the blessed dead, and establishes the nocturnal journey by which his bark traverses the underworld between sunset and sunrise. Each of these cosmological acts is presented as a consequence of the original crisis — the world's present architecture, from the position of the stars to the geography of the afterlife, results from the divine restructuring that followed humanity's rebellion.

The narrative acknowledges its own complexity. Ra's emotions shift rapidly: anger at the rebels, satisfaction at Sekhmet's initial slaughter, horror at its escalation, relief at the stratagem's success, and finally weariness that drives his withdrawal. This emotional range is unusual for an Egyptian deity — most mythological texts present the gods as stable, predictable, operating according to their natures. Ra's vacillation humanizes him in a way that makes the myth psychologically compelling, even as it raises theological questions about divine consistency that the text does not resolve.

Symbolism

The Destruction of Mankind operates through a dense symbolic register in which every element carries theological freight. The aging of Ra — bones of silver, flesh of gold, hair of lapis lazuli — encodes the god's materiality in the three most precious substances of the Egyptian world. This is not decay but a kind of crystallization: Ra does not grow weak in the human sense but becomes increasingly concentrated, increasingly divine, increasingly distant from the organic world of his creatures. The precious-metal description anticipates his withdrawal from earth to sky.

The Eye of Ra functions as the myth's central symbol. In Egyptian theology, the Eye is simultaneously a body part, an independent goddess, and a cosmic weapon. It can be Hathor, Sekhmet, Tefnut, or Wadjet depending on context — not because the Egyptians were confused about their goddesses, but because they understood the Eye as a single divine principle that manifests through different forms depending on the situation. When the Eye is gentle, she is Hathor, the cow-goddess of love, music, and maternal care. When she is provoked, she becomes Sekhmet, the lioness of plague and war. The transformation between these forms is not metamorphosis in the Greek sense but a shift in divine mood — the same force, expressed differently.

The beer dyed red as blood carries layered meaning. On the surface, it is a practical trick: the goddess mistakes beer for blood and becomes too drunk to kill. At a deeper level, the substitution enacts a theology of ritual. The Tekh festival at Dendera, which commemorated this episode, involved genuine ritual intoxication — priestesses and worshippers drank until they entered an altered state, understood as a liturgical reenactment of Sekhmet's pacification. The red beer is the prototype of all Egyptian ritual substitution: the offering that stands in for the thing itself, the image that does the work of reality.

Nut as the Heavenly Cow represents the sky in its maternal, nurturing aspect. She carries Ra on her back, her four legs at the four corners of the world, her belly painted with stars. When Ra ascends onto the cow, the separation of heaven and earth — previously a Heliopolitan creation event attributed to Shu lifting Nut from Geb — is reframed as a consequence of divine-human alienation. The cosmos acquires its present shape not through primordial creation but through historical crisis.

Seven thousand jars is a number of totality in Egyptian numerology, where seven signifies completeness (the seven gates of the underworld, the Seven Hathors who decree fate). The quantity signals that the rescue is comprehensive — not partial mercy but a complete salvation of the human species.

Cultural Context

The Book of the Heavenly Cow's placement in royal tombs of the New Kingdom (Tutankhamun through Ramesses VI, c. 1325-1140 BCE) connects the Destruction of Mankind to the theology of kingship. The pharaoh, as the living Horus and successor to Ra's earthly rule, inherits the consequences of Ra's withdrawal. Every king's reign is implicitly a continuation of the post-Destruction order: the gods are absent, and the pharaoh mediates between divine and human realms. The myth thus legitimizes both the institution of kingship and the temple cult — humans need priests and kings precisely because Ra no longer walks among them.

The Tekh festival (Festival of Drunkenness), celebrated annually at Dendera, Bubastis, and other Hathor cult centers, translated the myth into ritual practice. Excavations at the Mut temple precinct at Karnak have uncovered evidence of these celebrations: hundreds of smashed ceramic vessels, remnants of red-dyed beer, and inscriptions describing the 'drunkenness of Hathor.' The festival typically fell in the first month of the inundation season (Akhet), connecting it to the Nile flood's red-brown color — the 'blood' that annually transformed the landscape.

The myth's treatment of Ra's aging resonates with Egyptian anxieties about royal succession. A pharaoh who grew old and feeble was a theological problem: if the king embodies the solar god's power, what happens when the king declines? The Sed festival (Heb-Sed), celebrated after thirty years of reign and at shorter intervals thereafter, ritually renewed the king's vitality — a real-world response to the same problem the myth addresses through narrative. Amenhotep III, who celebrated three Sed festivals, was depicted with increasing frequency alongside Sekhmet statues — over seven hundred were commissioned for his funerary temple at Kom el-Hettan; hundreds were later dispersed to the Mut precinct at Karnak — suggesting that the Destruction of Mankind held special significance for kings who ruled into old age.

The relationship between the Destruction of Mankind and other ancient Near Eastern flood myths has been noted by scholars since the early twentieth century. While the Egyptian version substitutes beer for floodwaters and saves humanity through trickery rather than divine favor toward a single righteous man, the structural parallel — divine anger at humanity, near-total destruction, salvation of a remnant, cosmological restructuring — is significant. Jan Assmann has argued that the Egyptian myth represents an independent development from the same deep-structural pattern that produced the Mesopotamian flood traditions preserved in the Atrahasis epic and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The cult of Sekhmet at Memphis, where the goddess was worshipped as consort of Ptah, maintained an awareness of the Destruction myth through healing rituals. Sekhmet's priests (wab-priests of Sekhmet) served as physicians, and the treatment of plague and epidemic was understood as the pacification of Sekhmet's anger — a medical application of the mythological pattern. The seven hundred Sekhmet statues commissioned by Amenhotep III for his funerary temple at Kom el-Hettan — many later dispersed to the Mut precinct at Karnak — may represent a prophylactic installation, intended to keep the goddess permanently pacified through the sustained attention of cult worship.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The Destruction of Mankind belongs to a structural archetype that asks why the gods and humans no longer live together — why divine presence has been replaced by mediated worship, and whether the separation was punishment, withdrawal, or mutual necessity. The pattern recurs across traditions with no demonstrable contact: a primordial intimacy ends through crisis, the world is restructured, and the resulting institutions are explained as the repair-work of that rupture.

Mesopotamian — Atrahasis and the Flood

The Akkadian Atrahasis Epic (c. 1700 BCE) describes the gods creating humans as labor-substitutes, then regretting it when humanity multiplies and grows too loud for divine rest. Enlil sends plague, drought, and a flood. The structural contrast with the Egyptian version is sharp: Ra saves humanity through cunning (beer dyed as blood), Enlil nearly destroys it through sincerity. Egypt's god changes his mind; Mesopotamia's god is overruled by his peers. The Egyptian narrative requires no covenant with survivors — the existing divine order absorbs the crisis through trickery. The Mesopotamian narrative requires a covenant with Atrahasis that rewrites the terms of human existence.

Hindu — Pralaya and the Cosmic Dissolution

In the Vishnu Purana (Book I, Chapters 3–5, c. 3rd–5th century CE), the cosmos periodically dissolves (pralaya) when Brahma's day ends, and re-manifests at its beginning. Vishnu reclines on the cosmic serpent Shesha, preserving existence's seeds through the interval. The parallel to the Book of the Heavenly Cow is formal: in both cases, the world's present architecture is not original but rebuilt, and the current divine-human separation is an artifact of a prior crisis. The divergence is fundamental. The Egyptian dissolution is historical — caused by a specific failure (human rebellion), resolved by a specific act. The Hindu dissolution is cyclical — caused not by failure but by cosmic time. Ra leaves because humans disappointed him; Brahma's day ends because that is what days do.

Greek — The Ages of Man

Hesiod's Works and Days (c. 700 BCE) describes humanity's deterioration through five ages — Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, Iron — each farther from the gods than the last. Gods of the Golden Age lived among humans; Iron Age humans are abandoned to toil. The parallel to the Destruction of Mankind is the progressive withdrawal of divine presence, but the mechanism differs critically. In Hesiod, withdrawal is the byproduct of deterioration — the gods retreat as each age worsens. In the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra's withdrawal is a conscious response to a specific event. The Egyptian version is an event with a charter (the temple cult); the Greek version is a process with no institutional remedy — only a lament.

Norse — The Aesir After Ragnarök

Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda Gylfaginning (c. 1220 CE) describes how, after Ragnarök's death of the gods and the world's submersion and re-emergence, surviving gods repopulate the new earth without returning to direct governance. The parallel to Ra's withdrawal is structural: divine governance gives way to a restructured world. The inversion is precise. Ra withdraws because he is weary; he continues to govern from the sky, his retreat preserving authority at a distance. The Norse gods die at Ragnarök and do not return to governance at all. Egypt's solution to the divine-human problem preserves the divine while relocating it; Norse cosmology resolves it by letting the gods perish with the old world.

Modern Influence

The Destruction of Mankind has attracted sustained scholarly attention since the first complete publication of the Book of the Heavenly Cow from the tomb of Seti I. Erik Hornung's edition and translation (1982, with English adaptation in 1999) established the definitive text, superseding earlier partial publications by Lefebure (1886) and Naville (1876). The myth's influence extends across several domains.

In comparative mythology, the Destruction of Mankind is routinely cited alongside the Mesopotamian Atrahasis, the Babylonian section of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet XI), and the Hebrew flood narrative (Genesis 6-9) as evidence of a shared ancient Near Eastern pattern of divine destruction and human survival. The Egyptian version's distinctive features — beer substituted for water, a goddess tricked rather than a god persuaded, salvation through collective inebriation rather than individual righteousness — have been analyzed by Jan Assmann (Moses the Egyptian, 1997) and Geraldine Pinch (Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt, 2002) as evidence of Egyptian theology's pragmatic, non-moralistic approach to the divine-human relationship.

In feminist scholarship, the Hathor-Sekhmet transformation has been analyzed as a complex representation of feminine divine power. Rather than splitting the feminine into benevolent mother and destructive monster (as later traditions often do), the Egyptian myth presents a single goddess who encompasses both, with the transformation governed by context rather than moral judgment. Carolyn Graves-Brown's Dancing for Hathor: Women in Ancient Egypt (2010) and Alison Roberts's Hathor Rising: The Power of the Goddess in Ancient Egypt (1995) both explore this dynamic.

In popular culture, the Destruction of Mankind appears in several adaptations. The 1994 film Stargate references Sekhmet-like solar deities, while the video game Assassin's Creed Origins (2017) incorporates the myth into its Egyptian-themed narrative. The image of a goddess wading through blood has entered broader fantasy literature through figures like Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time' series, where divine feminine forces of destruction echo the Sekhmet archetype. The Moon Knight television series (2022) incorporated Ammit (a figure associated with divine punishment) as a central antagonist, drawing from the same theological ecosystem that produced the Destruction narrative.

The Tekh festival's association with ritual intoxication has attracted attention from scholars of altered states in religion, including Brian Muraresku's The Immortality Key (2020), which examines psychoactive substances in ancient religious practice. While Muraresku's claims about psychoactive beer additives in the Egyptian context remain speculative, the Tekh festival's explicit connection between inebriation and divine encounter makes it a recurrent reference point in this field.

Primary Sources

The Destruction of Mankind is preserved in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, a New Kingdom composition whose most complete version appears in the outer shrines of the tomb of Seti I (KV17, c. 1290 BCE). Partial copies survive in the tombs of Tutankhamun (KV62, c. 1325 BCE), Ramesses II, Ramesses III, and Ramesses VI. The standard edition and German translation is Erik Hornung, Der aegyptische Mythos von der Himmelskuh: Eine Ätiologie des Unvollkommenen (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 46, Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1982). The English translation appears in Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 148–157, with commentary. Hornung's edition supersedes earlier partial publications by Lefebure (1886) and Naville (1876) and is the authoritative text for all scholarly reference.

The text's placement in New Kingdom royal tombs connects it to the broader corpus of afterlife compositions inscribed for the pharaoh's use. Complementary primary material appears in the Amduat, the Book of Gates, and the Litany of Ra, all discussed in Hornung's Books of the Afterlife with full bibliographic references to the tomb inscriptions.

For the mythology of Sekhmet and the Tekh festival, the principal primary source is the Leiden-Papyrus I 346 (c. 1350–1300 BCE), which preserves hymns to Sekhmet and references to the pacification ritual; discussed in Joris Borghouts, Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts (Brill, 1978), pp. 51–57. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus (NYAM 1, c. 1600 BCE, probably copied from an Old Kingdom original) references the 'arrows of Sekhmet' as a disease etiology; translated in James Henry Breasted, The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus (University of Chicago Press, 1930).

Amenhotep III's Sekhmet installation at his funerary temple at Kom el-Hettan — over seven hundred statues attested, many later dispersed to the Mut precinct at Karnak — is documented in excavation reports by the Brooklyn Museum mission (Bothmer, 1960s) and the Johns Hopkins University mission (Betsy Bryan, 1990s–2010s); summarized in Betsy Bryan, 'The Temple of Mut: New Evidence on Amenhotep III's Building Projects,' in Amenhotep III: Perspectives on His Reign, ed. D. O'Connor and E. Cline (University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 65–97.

For the cosmological sections of the Book of the Heavenly Cow dealing with Ra's withdrawal and the restructuring of the sky, Nut's cosmological function is documented in Lana Troy, Patterns of Queenship in Ancient Egyptian Myth and History (Uppsala University, 1986), and in the Nut Book (papyrus and cenotaph of Seti I), translated by Alexandre Piankoff, The Tomb of Ramesses VI (Pantheon Books, 1954).

Significance

The Destruction of Mankind addresses the central theological problem of Egyptian religion: the relationship between divine order and human disorder, between Maat and isfet. Ra's creation contains within it the seeds of its own disruption — humans rebel because the creator ages, and the creator ages because time itself is a feature of the cosmos he brought into being. The myth does not resolve this paradox; it describes the consequences and the workaround. Ra withdraws, the temple cult substitutes for direct divine presence, and the annual festival commemorates the moment when destruction was averted through ingenuity rather than justice.

The myth's position within the Book of the Heavenly Cow connects it to the broader cosmological restructuring that produced the world as Egyptians experienced it. The separation of heaven and earth, the creation of the stellar sky on Nut's belly, the appointment of Thoth as nocturnal governor, and the delegation of earthly authority to Geb and subsequently to the pharaonic line — all these cosmological facts are presented as consequences of the Destruction. The world is not simply created; it is created twice, first in the primordial cosmogony and again in the aftermath of the crisis that ended the age of divine-human cohabitation.

For the development of Egyptian religious practice, the myth provides the charter for the temple cult. If the gods once lived among humans and no longer do, the temple becomes the necessary interface — the place where the divine image can be cared for, where offerings can be made, where the gap between absent gods and present worshippers can be ritually bridged. Every daily temple ritual — the washing, clothing, and feeding of the cult statue — is implicitly a response to the situation the Destruction of Mankind describes.

The myth also establishes a template for the Egyptian understanding of crisis and restoration. The Nile flood, which annually inundated the land with red-brown water that could appear blood-like, was liturgically linked to the Tekh festival, creating a cyclical reenactment of destruction and salvation built into the agricultural calendar. The cosmos is sustained not by permanent stability but by recurring cycles of threat and recovery — a theological insight that distinguishes Egyptian thought from traditions that imagine a single catastrophic end.

The myth's treatment of divine-human separation also carries implications for the theology of sacrifice and offering. Once Ra has withdrawn to the sky, humans can no longer interact with the gods directly. The temple cult — the daily feeding, washing, and clothing of the divine image — fills the gap that Ra's departure created. Every offering placed before a cult statue is, in this theological framework, a response to the Destruction of Mankind: humans sustain the gods through ritual because the gods no longer sustain themselves through presence. The myth thus provides the origin-story for the entire Egyptian temple system, explaining why the gods require human service and why that service must never be interrupted.

Connections

The Destruction of Mankind connects to multiple existing Satyori content pages. Ra's deity page documents his role as solar creator and his nightly journey through the duat, which begins only after his withdrawal from earth — the very event this myth describes. Sekhmet's page covers her broader cult at Memphis as consort of Ptah and her association with plague and healing, both of which derive from the destructive capacity demonstrated in the Destruction narrative.

Hathor's deity page addresses her cultic role at Dendera, where the Tekh festival was most elaborately celebrated. The transformation between Hathor and Sekhmet — peaceful cow-goddess becoming raging lioness — is the mythological foundation for both goddesses' cults and is most fully narrated in this myth. Thoth's appointment as Ra's deputy connects to his page's documentation of his lunar governance and his role as mediator between solar and chthonic realms.

The Valley of the Kings page covers the physical location where the Book of the Heavenly Cow was inscribed, connecting the myth to the New Kingdom royal funerary program. The Karnak Temple complex, where the Mut precinct's hundreds of Sekhmet statues were installed by Amenhotep III, provides the archaeological context for the myth's cultic reception.

The Eye of Ra symbol page documents the theological concept that drives the narrative — the sun-god's feminine extension that can operate independently as a destructive or nurturing force. The Book of the Dead connects through its shared mortuary context, as the judgment scene in Chapter 125 presupposes the cosmic order established after Ra's withdrawal.

The Osiris page provides the complementary mythological strand: while the Destruction of Mankind explains Ra's withdrawal from earth, the Osirian cycle explains how the dead are governed in his absence. Together, these two myth-cycles constitute the theological foundations of the New Kingdom religious system.

The Ankh symbol, held by the gods who participate in Ra's council, represents the life that the myth places in jeopardy and ultimately preserves. The Djed pillar connects through the theme of cosmic stability: the restructuring that follows Ra's withdrawal establishes the stable cosmological architecture (sky, earth, atmospheric space) that the djed symbolizes. The Weighing of the Heart scene presupposes the moral order established after the Destruction — the ethical framework against which the deceased is judged is itself a consequence of the divine-human separation this myth describes.

The Maat page connects through the fundamental tension the myth explores: humanity's rebellion violates Maat, and Ra's response — both the destruction and the subsequent restructuring — aims to restore it. The entire post-Destruction order, from the solar cycle to the temple cult to the afterlife judgment, is designed to maintain the Maat that humanity's rebellion briefly disrupted.

Further Reading