Real, but the surviving record is thin or comes from one period only. In the record from the very beginning.
Babi bꜣbꜣ
first-born of Osiris, and the Bebon of the Greeks
The myth, retold
The story as it is told
A retelling, not a translation. What follows is the story as it is commonly told, drawn together from the better popular and scholarly accounts. It is not keyed to any single ancient text, and the ancient sources rarely agree with each other as neatly as a retelling has to. The attested record — with its sources, its gaps, and its disagreements — is below.
There is a god in the Pyramid Texts who is called the first-born son of Osiris, and he is not Horus.
That should stop you, if you know the story.
Why it should stop you
The Osiris myth is the load-bearing narrative of Egyptian religion. Osiris is murdered by his brother Set. Isis recovers him and conceives a son. That son, Horus, grows up and spends eighty years in litigation against his uncle to recover his father's throne — and the whole point, the thing the case turns on, is that Horus is the rightful heir.
So an older son, who is on Set's side, is a loose brick in the foundation.
Budge mentions it in a subordinate clause while writing about a different god entirely: Bebi, or Baba, or Babai, "was the first-born son of Osiris." Then he moves on.
I have flagged it as an open thread rather than built anything on it, because it comes to us third-hand and one clause is not much to hang a succession crisis on. But it is there.
The god nearly lost to a spelling
Before any of that, a confession about method.
This corpus keeps a list of names still to research, and it searches every archived book for each one before deciding whether the material exists. Under the census spelling — Babi — the search returned exactly one hit: a bare line in a list of gods.
One hit means "not worth a batch." He was nearly written off.
But the search also generates alternative spellings, because Victorian Egyptologists transliterated inconsistently, and the generator had a gap: it tried swapping the first vowel of a name and never the last.
Babi → Baba returns eleven hits.
That is where the filiation is, and the Greek identifications, and the animal, and the underworld office. All of it was sitting behind a single letter at the end of a word.
The gap is now fixed. But it is the second time this has happened — an earlier group of gods was almost abandoned before someone tried Akhemu-seku instead of Ikhemu-sek — and the lesson is not really about vowels. It is that a negative result is only as good as the spellings you thought to try.
What he actually is
Set-aligned, and in charge of virility.
Budge, reporting Brugsch, says Baba was "personified in the form of some Typhonic mythological animal" — Typhon being the Greek name for Set, so "Typhonic" means he belongs to the disorderly faction — "and was the god who presided over the phallus."
There is also a strange detail: the blood from his nose fell to the ground and grew into plants, which then turned into cedars. I have no idea what to do with that. It reads like the tail end of a real story that nobody wrote down.
He holds actual office, too. In one region of the underworld, called Anrut-f, there are four princes: Ra, Osiris, Shu, and Bebi. Three of those are among the largest gods in Egypt. The fourth is this one.
The Greeks knew him twice
Two classical writers have him under two different names — Plutarch calls him Bebon, Hellanicus calls him Babys — and Budge adds that "Bebon was a name of Typhon," which is to say, a name of Set.
So we have a figure who is either a distinct god who fought on Set's side, or an epithet of Set that drifted loose and started being counted separately.
Egyptian religion does this constantly, and it is one of the genuinely hard things about it. A name can be a god, or an aspect of a god, or a job a god does on Tuesdays, and the texts do not always distinguish. Astennu has the same problem from the other direction — a name that Budge says is Thoth, sitting in a list of four judges next to Thoth.
What he looks like
Unknown, and I want to be careful here.
Budge notes that the way the name is written ends with a sign meaning animal hide — the marker Egyptians used to file a word under "animal." So he is an animal. That is all it tells us.
Everyone says baboon, and it fits: baboons are aggressive, conspicuously virile, and already sacred in Egypt. It is very probably right.
But "very probably right" is not the same as attested, and nothing in the archived material names the species. So the entry says animal, and the illustration is on hold, because drawing a baboon would quietly convert a good guess into evidence.
Overview
Babi is the entry the triage nearly lost.
Searched under the census spelling he returns a single hit — a bare line in a Pyramid Texts name-list. Searched as Baba, he returns eleven, including a filiation, a Greek identification, and an underworld office. The variant generator that saved the Akhemu-seku missed this one because it shifts leading vowels and not trailing ones; that gap is now closed in the script.
What he turns out to be is a dangerous god of male potency, counted among Set's company, and identified by two classical writers under two different names.
Attestation history
Old Kingdom. Budge's Pyramid Texts god-list carries the cluster across four reigns [budge-1904]:
- Baba — Unas 532
- Babi — Unas 644, 647
- Baabu — Pepi I 568
- Babua — Pepi I 604
Whether these are one god with unstable orthography or several related figures is not settled here, but the density is the point: some form of this name is in the Pyramid Texts repeatedly, across the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.
Book of the Dead. Budge places him in the underworld administration: "Ra, Osiris, Shu, and Bebi were the princes of the portion of the Underworld which was known by the name of Anrut-f" [budge-1904].
That is a striking company to keep. Ra, Osiris and Shu are three of the largest gods in Egypt, and the fourth prince of that region is Babi.
What the texts say
First-born son of Osiris. Budge states it plainly: Bebi, or Baba, or Babai "was the first-born son of Osiris" [budge-1904].
This deserves to be flagged as strange rather than passed over. The famous son of Osiris is Horus, and the entire Osirian legal drama turns on Horus being the heir. A first-born son who is not Horus, and who is aligned with Set, is a loose thread in the best-known story in Egyptian religion — and Budge drops it in a subordinate clause while writing about Shu.
The Typhonic animal and the phallus. Budge, reporting Brugsch: "Baba was personified in the form of some Typhonic mythological animal, and was the god who presided over the phallus; the blood which fell from his nose grew up into plants which subsequently changed into cedars" [budge-1904].
"Typhonic" is the period's term for Set-aligned — Typhon being the Greek identification of Set. So Babi belongs to the disorderly side of the pantheon, and his department is virility.
The nosebleed detail is the sort of thing that is either a garbled version of something specific or a genuine aetiology for cedar. Budge attributes it to Brugsch and does not vouch for it; neither does this entry.
Two Greek names for him. Budge reports Pleyte as having "rightly identified Bebi or Baba with the Βέβων or Βέβωνα of Plutarch (De Iside, § 62) and with the Βάβυς of Hellanicus" [budge-1904], adding that "Bebon was a name of Typhon, i.e., Set."
Plutarch, fetched 2026-07-29, settles the ambiguity by preserving it. The passage is now archived and reads:
Some say that one of the companions of Typhon was Bebon, but Manetho says that Bebon was still another name by which Typhon was called. The name signifies "restraint" or "hindrance," as much as to say that, when things are going along in a proper way and making rapid progress towards the right end, the power of Typhon obstructs them. [plutarch-de-iside]
Two things this gives us that Budge's second-hand report did not.
First, the disagreement is ancient. Plutarch does not decide whether Bebon is a companion of Set or another name for Set — he records both readings, and attributes the identification to Manetho, an Egyptian priest writing in Greek in the third century BC. So the question this entry raised is not a modern confusion; it was already open two thousand years ago, between sources who were much closer to the material.
Second, an etymology: "restraint" or "hindrance." Bebon is the power that obstructs — the thing that gets in the way when matters are running well. That is a precise and rather unglamorous job description, and it sits oddly beside Brugsch's phallus god. Whether the Egyptian bꜣbꜣ supports "hindrance" is a question for a lexicon, not for Plutarch.
So the Greek tradition knew this figure twice over, and at least one of those witnesses treated the name as belonging to Set himself rather than to a separate god. That is consistent with Babi being either a distinct Set-aligned deity or an epithet of Set that hardened — the same ambiguity as astennu, arriving from a different direction.
The determinative. Budge notes the hieroglyphic writing "is determined by the skin of an animal" [budge-1904] — the sign that marks a word as belonging to the animal-hide category. He offers it as proof that Bebon "was represented by an animal." It does not tell us which.
The standard modern identification is the baboon, and the baboon fits the department: aggressive, conspicuously virile, and already a religious animal in Egypt. The archived sources do not say so, and this entry does not assert it. See open threads.
Iconography
Undescribed in the archived material beyond the animal-skin determinative.
Cult and practice
Nothing. No temple, festival or priesthood appears in the archived sources.
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* I, Pyramid Texts god-list | **Baba** (Unas 532), **Babi** (Unas 644, 647), **Baabu** (Pepi I 568), **Babua** (Pepi I 604) |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, on Shu | Ra, Osiris, Shu and Bebi as princes of **Anrut-f** |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, same passage | "the first-born son of Osiris" |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, citing Brugsch | Typhonic animal form; presided over the phallus; the nosebleed-and-cedars aetiology |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, citing Pleyte | identification with Plutarch's **Bebon** and Hellanicus's **Babys**; "Bebon was a name of Typhon" |
[plutarch-de-iside] | *De Iside* **§ 49**, direct | "Some say that one of the companions of Typhon was Bebon, but **Manetho says that Bebon was still another name by which Typhon was called**" |
[plutarch-de-iside] | *De Iside* § 49, direct | the name "signifies 'restraint' or 'hindrance'" — the obstructing power |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II | the name determined by the skin of an animal |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vols I–II. Public domain, archived. Note that most of the substance here is Budge relaying Brugsch and Pleyte, so it is third-hand and should be treated as such.[plutarch-de-iside]— Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, Babbitt (Loeb) translation. Public domain, archived 2026-07-29. Note the Bebon passage is at § 49, not § 62 as Budge's citation gives it.[sethe-1908]— Sethe, Pyramidentexte. Not fetched. Needed to determine whether Baba / Babi / Baabu / Babua are one god or several.
Open questions
- ~~Fetch Plutarch De Iside~~ — closed 2026-07-29, archived. It confirms the identification, supplies an etymology ("restraint"/"hindrance"), attributes the Bebon-is-Set reading to Manetho, and shows the ambiguity is ancient rather than modern. Budge's section number is wrong — the passage is § 49, not § 62.
- Test "restraint / hindrance" against the Egyptian bꜣbꜣ in a lexicon. Plutarch is giving a Greek gloss on an Egyptian word and those are frequently folk-etymologies.
- Reconcile Plutarch's obstructing power with Brugsch's phallus god. They do not obviously describe the same deity.
- Settle whether the four Pyramid Text spellings are one god. Sethe would answer it.
- Establish the baboon identification from a source, or leave the animal unnamed. It is the standard reading and is currently unsupported here.
- Chase the "first-born son of Osiris" claim to its origin. If it holds, it needs to be reflected on osiris and probably on horus, because it complicates the succession that the whole Osirian cycle is about.
- Determine whether Babi is a distinct god or an epithet of set that acquired independence — and note that Hellanicus and Plutarch may not agree.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ◐partial — Genuinely attested, but the record is thin or single-period.
"Babi", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded partial, retrieved 2026-08-10.