The pharaoh who tried to cancel the gods
Around 1350 BC, the pharaoh Akhenaten did something no Egyptian king had tried before. He turned the country's worship away from its many gods and towards just one, the Aten, the disc of the sun. Temples to AMUN were closed and his name was chiselled off monuments.
It did not outlast him. After Akhenaten died the old gods came straight back, and the boy king who soon took the throne changed his own name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun — swapping the Aten for AMUN, so nobody could doubt which side he was on. Yes, that Tutankhamun.
Animal heads were a clue, not a portrait
The animal heads were a way of showing what a god was like. A single god could be pictured several ways: HATHOR as a cow, as a woman with cow's ears, or as a woman wearing horns with the sun between them; THOTH as an ibis-headed man or as a baboon. SOBEK, the crocodile, had the power and danger of the Nile's real crocodiles. ANUBIS took the form of a jackal, an animal often seen around desert cemeteries, and became the god who guarded the dead. Gods could merge as well as change shape: AMUN, the god of Thebes, was joined with the sun god RA as Amun-Ra, king of the gods, and his temple at Karnak grew into one of the largest religious sites ever built.
The heart on the scales
The Egyptians believed the dead faced a trial. The heart, which they thought held a person's mind and memory, was weighed against the feather of MAAT, the goddess of truth and order. ANUBIS checked the scales and THOTH wrote down the result. Before the weighing, the dead person declared all the wrongs they had not done — I have not stolen, I have not lied, I have not made anyone cry — words that come from the Book of the Dead, a collection of spells buried with many mummies.
A heart weighed down by wrongdoing was eaten by Ammit, a monster that was part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus. Embalmers usually left the heart inside the body while removing other organs, because its owner would need it for this moment.
The sky has a body
In Egyptian art the sky is the goddess NUT, arched over the world on her fingertips and toes, her body scattered with stars. Beneath her lies GEB, the earth, and between them stands SHU, the air, holding the two apart. Every evening NUT swallowed the sun, and every morning she gave birth to it again. She is painted on tomb ceilings and inside coffin lids, stretched over the dead like a starry roof.
A goddess with a great many cats
BASTET began as a fierce lioness goddess and softened over the centuries into a cat. Her festival at the city of Bubastis was enormous — the Greek writer Herodotus claimed around 700,000 people went — and cats sacred to her were mummified in vast numbers. In 1888 a farmer dug into a cat cemetery holding tens of thousands of them. Many were shipped to Britain and sold as fertiliser, one load alone weighing about nineteen tonnes. Pharaohs, pyramids and mummies of the human kind are in our Ancient Egypt puzzle in History.