How this reference works
Most online pantheon references present every name with equal confidence. That is not possible honestly. Some gods have three thousand years of attestation across a dozen corpora. Some are a name in a spell list and nothing else.
Every entry declares a grade
| Grade | Meaning | Count |
|---|---|---|
| ●full | Well documented. Several independent sources across different periods. | 55 |
| ◐partial | Real, but the surviving record is thin or comes from one period only. | 87 |
| ○name-only | A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work. | 84 |
| ⚠audit | We could not trace this name to a source we trust. The page is the investigation. | 51 |
| ☐stub | Not researched yet. Recorded so the roster is complete. Do not cite it. | 252 |
A grade rises only when a new attestation is found — never by writing more. That single rule is what stops a reference like this drifting into invention.
Every entry also declares a period
The badge says when this god first turns up in the written record — not how important it was. A god badged Old Kingdom has been worshipped for four thousand years; one badged Greco-Roman may be just as real and simply younger.
| Badge | Dates | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Old Kingdom | c. 2686–2181 BCE | Attested in the Pyramid Texts — the oldest religious writing that survives from anywhere on earth. A god badged this way has been worshipped for well over four thousand years. |
| Middle Kingdom | c. 2055–1650 BCE | First appears in the Coffin Texts, when the afterlife stopped being a royal privilege and opened to anyone who could afford a decorated coffin. |
| New Kingdom | c. 1550–1069 BCE | First appears in the Book of the Dead or in the underworld books painted on royal tomb walls. This is the era most people picture when they picture Egypt. |
| Late & Ptolemaic | c. 664–30 BCE | First attested in the great temple theologies — Edfu, Dendera, Kom Ombo — where the latest and most systematised version of Egyptian religion is written out at length. |
| Greco-Roman | c. 332 BCE – 395 CE | Known mainly through outsiders writing in Greek, or through gods deliberately blended for a mixed population. Real, and a long way downstream of the Egyptian sources. |
| Modern reception | 19th century onward | A modern construction with a traceable birth date — usually Victorian occultism or later revival. Recorded here as reception history, never as ancient practice. |
Date ranges follow the conventional Egyptological chronology and are approximate — scholars differ by decades, and more at the earlier end.
Attribution claims, not truth claims
Egyptian religion is three millennia of local theologies that openly contradict each other. The Heliopolitan Ennead and the Hermopolitan Ogdoad are rival creation accounts, both orthodox, both current at once. Osiris at Abydos is not Osiris at Busiris. We record what a text says, from a place, in a period. The variation is the product, not a problem to resolve.
The Budge problem
In Egyptology, public-domain availability and scholarly reliability run in opposite directions. Budge died in 1934, so his work is free and everywhere — and by modern standards substantially unreliable. The accurate translations are in copyright.
So: Budge is used here for transcribed name lists and reproduced plates, where he is a competent copyist, and never as the sole support for a claim about what a text means.
Two kinds of content, never mixed
The record is verified loci from dated sources. Citable. Investigated claims is working material that has not been confirmed — shown so an open investigation is visible rather than hidden, and never merged into the record. Wherever you see it, it carries a notice saying exactly that.
The companion pages
- The provenance audit — the names that could not be traced, kept and investigated rather than deleted.
- Sources — every work cited, and exactly which claims rest on each one.
- Changelog — how the grades have moved over time.
How many Egyptian gods are there?
There is no single answer, and the spread is the useful part. This census carries 497 names. Scholarship can name roughly 1,500 distinct deities. Leitz's lexicon catalogues around 56,000 — but that is a count of names and epithets, not gods, because a single deity accumulates dozens of bynames, some of which later became gods in their own right.
Sorting those apart is most of the work. It is also why one of our verdicts is epithet, not a deity.