Real, but the surviving record is thin or comes from one period only.
Armai
sixth hour, and the eighteenth finger
Part of the Hours of the Day and Night.
Overview
Armai holds the sixth hour — midday, and midnight, since the same twelve gods serve both.
He is also the eighteenth finger-breadth of the royal cubit [budge-1904].
And Budge spells him three different ways within a single chapter: Armai in the hours list, Armaiu in the rota table on the following page, and Armaua in the cubit list a few pages earlier. All three describe the same position in the same sequence.
Attestation history
The twelve. Budge's list of the gods and goddesses of the hours of the day [budge-1904]:
| Hour | God | Hour | God | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Imsety (Amseth) | 7 | Maa-tef-f | |
| 2 | Hapy (Hap) | 8 | Ar-ren-f-tchesef | |
| 3 | Duamutef (Tua-mat-f) | 9 | Hentch-hentch | |
| 4 | Qebehsenuef | 10 | Qet | |
| 5 | Heq | 11 | An-erta-nef-nebat | |
| 6 | Armai | 12 | Matchet |
And the night is the same twelve. Budge: "The deities of the hours of the night are the same as those of the hours of the day, and their names follow each other in the order in which they occur as gods of the hours of the day" [budge-1904].
The rota. Budge also prints a table of the gods who watch "before and behind Osiris-Serapis" through the twelve hours, and it is a shift rotation: each god stands behind Osiris for one hour, then before him for the next [budge-1904].
This god is behind Osiris in hour 6 and before Osiris in hour 7.
The cubit. "18. Armaua" in the list of the twenty-eight finger-breadths [budge-1904] — immediately after Heq at 17 and before Maa-tef-f at 19, matching their hour order exactly.
What the texts say
Midday and midnight are the same god. Because the night hours repeat the day hours in order, the sixth hour of the day and the sixth hour of the night have the same deity. Noon and midnight — the two extremes of the daily cycle — are held by one figure.
Whether the Egyptians intended that symmetry or simply reused a list is not answerable from the sources here, and the entry does not assume.
Three spellings in one chapter. This is the same failure already recorded for Ut-metu, who is Hetch-met in Budge's other volume. Here it happens three times inside a handful of pages, which suggests Budge was transcribing from several different tables without normalising them — useful to know, because it means his lists may preserve genuine variants rather than errors.
Iconography
None recorded.
Cult and practice
None.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, §V, p. 294 | Armai as god of the sixth hour of the day |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, §VI, p. 294 | the same twelve serve the hours of the night |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, §VII, p. 295 | Armaiu behind Osiris in hour 6, before Osiris in hour 7 |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, §I, p. 291 | Armaua as the eighteenth finger-breadth of the royal cubit |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. II, ch. XIX "Miscellaneous Gods", §V (hours of the day, p. 294), §VI (hours of the night, p. 294) and §VII (the watch before and behind Osiris-Serapis, p. 295). Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md); these are name-lists and tables, which is transcription rather than interpretation.[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open questions
- Settle the spelling across Budge's three lists, and establish whether the variation is his or his sources'.
- Identify the manuscript behind the hour-lists.
- Test whether the noon/midnight identity is deliberate.
- Determine whether the fingers 17–20 sequence is a shared source or a real link.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ◐partial — Genuinely attested, but the record is thin or single-period.
"Armai", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded partial, retrieved 2026-08-10.