A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work.
Nebun
the god a stele-owner was prophet of
Overview
He is attested once, in a job description — and the object carrying it is famous.
[The legend] is cut in hieroglyphs upon a large stone stele which was made for Ankh-Psemthek, a prophet of Nebun, in the reign of Nectanebus I, who reigned from 373 B.C. to 360 B.C. The stele was dug up in 1828 at Alexandria, and was given to Prince Metternich by Muhammad Ali Pasha. [budge-1914]
This is the Metternich Stele — one of the most important magical texts to survive from Egypt, a cippus of Horus covered in spells against snakebite and scorpion sting, and the fullest source for the legend of Isis and the Seven Scorpions and the poisoning of the infant Horus.
And the man who commissioned it was a prophet of Nebun.
What that is worth, and what it is not
A prophet of X is a real priestly office, held by a named man, on a dated monument. It establishes that Nebun was a god with a priesthood in the fourth century BC — which is more than a bare name-list entry gives.
It establishes nothing else. Budge names the god in passing while explaining the stele's provenance, and never returns to him. No domain, no city, no image, no myth.
The temptation here is the one this reference exists to resist: the stele is spectacular, the legend on it is famous, and it would be easy to let that spill onto the god in the ownership line. It does not. Ankh-Psemthek's priesthood tells us Nebun existed and was served. The snakebite spells are Isis' and Horus'.
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-1914] | *Literature of the Ancient Egyptians*, on the **Metternich Stele**, p. 88 | "**Ankh-Psemthek, a prophet of Nebun**," in the reign of **Nectanebus I** (373–360 BC); the stele **dug up in 1828 at Alexandria** and given to **Prince Metternich** |
[budge-1914] | *ibid.*, index | "**Nebun**, 88" — pointing back at the same sentence |
Sources
[budge-1914]— Budge, Literature of the Ancient Egyptians. Public domain, archived. The god is named only in the provenance note; the stele's actual text, which Budge translates at length, is about Isis and Horus and does not mention him.
Open questions
- Is Nebun a place rather than a god? "Prophet of X" takes a divine name in the overwhelming majority of cases, but the corpus has been caught by exactly this construction before — hebit turned out to be a town inside "Harmakhis in Hebit" (C416). Test it.
- ~~Read the Metternich Stele text in full.~~ Closed 2026-07-30. Budge translates it
- Nebun is named nowhere in it. The legend belongs to Isis, Horus and Thoth; this god's
- Nectanebus I gives a hard date range, 373–360 BC. That is one of the firmest dates attached to any name in this corpus and worth keeping visible.
- Does neb-un parse? Neb is "lord"; un may be "existence/being" or the hare-sign. A lord of X, if so — trap form 1 territory.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Nebun", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.