Mandulis

Almost every god in this reference is Egyptian, exported. Isis reaches Rome. Serapis is invented for Alexandria. Osiris turns up in Greek philosophy.

Mandulis goes the other way. He comes into Egypt, from below it, and the whole shape of his story is an import rather than an export.

What he was called before the Greeks got to him

The Egyptians wrote him Merul. They also wrote him Menruil, and Menlil, and Mer-uter — four attempts at a name that was not theirs to begin with, being spelled out in a script designed for a different language.

Then the Greeks arrived, heard some combination of the first two, and wrote Mandulis.

And that is the name in every modern book. Nobody says Merul. The Greek compression won, permanently, and the god is now filed under a version of his name that no Egyptian priest ever used.

This happens constantly once you start looking for it. The city Egypt called Djedet, whose ram-god was Ba-neb-Djedet, is in every atlas as Mendes. The sacred bull Bakha is Buchis. The Greeks were not being careless — they were doing what anybody does with a foreign name, which is to shave it into something their own mouth can manage — but the effect is that a layer of Greek sits between us and a great many Egyptian gods, and it is usually invisible.

With Mandulis you can see it, because all four originals survived alongside the Greek.

Where he came from

He is not Egyptian, and the worship is probably very ancient. That is the whole statement, and the context places him among the peoples at the southern end of the Red Sea and down the African coast.

So: Nubia, or somewhere further south still. A god from beyond the frontier, old enough that by the time Egyptians were writing his name down they were already recording a foreign tradition rather than starting one.

The buildings are the real evidence

Here is what lifts him out of the category of names-in-a-list, and it is archaeology rather than mythology.

At Philae — the island temple complex at the First Cataract, the traditional southern edge of Egypt — there was a small shrine to him. It stood behind the colonnade of another temple, and it seems to have been built by one of the early Ptolemies, possibly Ptolemy Philadelphus, in the third century BC.

At Talmis — modern Kalabsha, well south of the border, in Nubia proper — he had a temple, and the emperor Augustus rebuilt it, on the spot where an older one had stood.

Sit with that for a moment. A Greek-descended pharaoh puts up a shrine to a Nubian god at Egypt's southern gate. Three centuries later, the first emperor of Rome pays to rebuild that god's main temple, further south still.

Neither of those men was Egyptian. Neither of them was Nubian. Both of them decided that the local god of that stretch of river was worth spending money on — which is what you do at a frontier, when the people on the other side of it are people you need on your side.

A god is a diplomatic instrument as well as a religious one, and Mandulis is one of the clearest cases of it on this shelf.

The thing we cannot tell you

What he was god of.

Not one line here says. There is his origin, his four spellings, his two temples, and his imperial patronage — and no function, no domain, no story, and no description of what he looked like.

The standard modern account calls him a sun god of Lower Nubia, usually shown in an elaborate crown of plumes and horns and cobras. That may well be right. It is not in these books, so it is not being asserted here.

The frustrating part is that the evidence exists and is in excellent condition. The Kalabsha temple is still standing — it was cut into blocks and moved to higher ground in the 1960s, ahead of the reservoir that would have drowned it, and reassembled. Its walls are covered in reliefs of him.

The god whose function nobody here can state has a temple you could walk into this afternoon.