A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work. Arrives with the Book of the Dead.
Iah jꜥḥ
the moon, as a bare name
Overview
This entry is ○ name-only: the name is attested, and almost nothing else is. That is a real finding rather than an absence of work — it records that the name was searched across every archived source and says exactly what came back.
What the archive holds
Budge's catalogue of gods named in the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead includes Aah [budge-1904]. His index carries Aah (ii. 323), Ah (Aah) (ii. 325), and the compound Aah-Tehuti (i. 412–413) [budge-1904].
That is the whole of it. A name in a list, and a compound with Thoth.
One trap worth recording, because a careless search finds it and mistakes it for the god: Budge's festival calendar contains Heb-aah, a festival name, which is not this deity [budge-1904]. The triage flagged nine hits for "aah"; several are that calendar entry.
The compound Aah-Tehuti is the one substantive thing here. Thoth is a lunar god, and the fusion says the moon and the god of reckoning were close enough to share a name — which is consistent with the moon being the instrument by which Egyptian time was counted.
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*, as cited above | the name, in the loci given |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vols I–II. Public domain, archived.
Open questions
- Establish Iah as an independent deity rather than a lunar epithet attached to Thoth or Khonsu. Nothing archived does this.
- Read the loci behind Budge's index references (ii. 323, ii. 325) — a list entry may sit beside a real passage.
- Determine the relationship between Iah, khonsu and thoth. Egypt had at least three lunar deities and the division of labour is not obvious.
- Check whether Ahmose ("Iah is born"), the founder of the XVIIIth Dynasty, is theophoric in this god — a royal name would be strong evidence of an active cult, exactly as Nit-hetep is for neith.
- Searched 2026-07-29 across all 8 archived sources with generated spelling variants; the loci above are everything that returned.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Iah", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.