Real, but the surviving record is thin or comes from one period only.
Naunet nwnt
the primeval mother, and a name collision
Part of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis.
Overview
Naunet is the primeval water considered as a mother rather than as an abyss — the female half of the first pair of the Ogdoad, and the counterpart of nu.
She also presents this corpus with its cleanest naming hazard. Budge transliterates her as Nut, which is exactly how he transliterates the sky goddess. Two entirely different deities, one spelling, in the same two volumes. Modern Egyptology separates them as Naunet and Nut; a reader working directly from Budge has nothing to separate them by except context.
Attestation history
She is named as second of the eight gods of Khemennu: "Nu, Nut, Hehu, Hehut, Kekui, Kekuit, Kerh, and Kerhet" [budge-1904].
Budge gives her a single short treatment, and its brevity is itself the finding: "Of Nut, the female counterpart of Nu, little need be said here, except that she was regarded as the primeval mother, with whom in later dynastic times were identified several goddesses, e.g., Hathor, Mut, Nit, or Neith, and whose attributes were assigned to them" [budge-1904].
What the texts say
She is a source that later goddesses drew on. The one substantive claim is that Hathor, Mut and Neith took over her attributes. That makes Naunet less a figure with a career than a reservoir — a set of qualities about primeval motherhood that got distributed to goddesses who had cults.
Whether she existed independently is contested. Maspero held that the four female members of the Ogdoad were "gods formed according to the laws of grammar" — invented to give the four male gods counterparts [budge-1904]. Budge disagreed. The dispute is set out on the group page; it applies to Naunet more sharply than to the others, because she is the one whose name is most transparently the masculine name with a feminine ending.
Iconography
Human form; or uraeus-headed with a disk above; or cat-headed [budge-1904]. The cat head is the standard female-Ogdoad marker, against the frog and serpent heads of the males.
Cult and practice
None recorded in the sources here.
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, paut of Hermopolis | Naunet (as *Nut*) second of the eight gods of Khemennu |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, on the first pair | the primeval mother; attributes later assigned to Hathor, Mut and Neith |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, citing Lanzone | uraeus-and-disk head; cat head |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. I, the section on the paut of Hermopolis. Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md).[lanzone]— Lanzone, Dizionario di Mitologia Egizia, pll. 168 ff. and p. 685, cited by Budge at second hand. Public domain; not archived here.[brugsch-religion]— Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, cited by Budge. Public domain; not archived here.[maspero-myth]— Maspero, La Mythologie Égyptienne, p. 257, cited by Budge. Public domain; not archived here.
Open questions
- The Nut / Nut collision needs a standing note in
05-TRANSLITERATION.md. Budge uses one spelling for two unrelated goddesses. Any automated extraction from his text will conflate them, and this corpus does automated extraction. - Find an attestation of Naunet outside an Ogdoad list. If there is none, Maspero's grammatical-artefact argument gains considerably and the entry should say so.
- Establish which of Hathor, Mut and Neith actually absorb her attributes, with texts. Budge asserts the transfer without demonstrating it.
- Verify the nwnt form against a modern lexicon.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ◐partial — Genuinely attested, but the record is thin or single-period.
"Naunet", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded partial, retrieved 2026-08-10.