Well documented. Several independent sources across different periods. In the record from the very beginning.
Nu nw
the water before anything
Part of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis.
The figure, plainly
The water that is still there
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.
Egypt had two stories about how the world began, kept them both, and never appeared to feel the need to choose.
The one everybody tells is from Heliopolis: a single god, alone in the dark, who makes himself somewhere to stand and then divides into three. The other is older — according to the scholar who wrote the standard English account of both — and it belongs to a city in Middle Egypt whose name means the city of the Eight Gods.
Nu is the first of those eight, and he is the hardest kind of god to draw.
Not an ocean
He is water, but he is not a sea god, and getting this wrong makes the whole thing unintelligible.
There is no shore. There is no surface to sail on, no depth to sink into, no current going anywhere. Nu is water in the sense of undifferentiated stuff — dark, limitless, and above all not doing anything.
The clue is a piece of wordplay in the creation text. The creator says he raised the first gods "out of the watery mass — out of inactivity." The Egyptian words sitting next to each other there are nu and nen, and Budge draws the obvious conclusion: Nu is not simply water, he is inertness. The state of affairs before there is any state of affairs.
Creation is subtraction
Here is what I find genuinely striking about this, and it is a real difference from the traditions most readers will have grown up with.
Nothing in the Egyptian creation is made from nothing.
The water was always there. The darkness on it was always there. What creation does is make distinctions inside it: raise a mound out of the flood, separate the light from the dark lying on the surface, push the sky up off the ground and hold it there.
So the first divine act is not manufacture. It is division — and everything that follows, the whole enormous pantheon, is a set of distinctions drawn in a material that already existed and was simply sitting there.
Which has a consequence the Egyptians followed all the way through.
He never goes away
You cannot destroy the thing you drew your distinctions in.
Nu is not defeated at creation, not banished, not killed. He is underneath. He is around the edges. The sun goes down into him every evening and comes up out of him every morning — the texts say, repeatedly, that Ra came forth from Nu, and they mean it as a daily event, not a founding one.
And once a year the water came back over the fields.
This is the part where the theology stops being abstract. Budge notes that the ocean and the Nile were both identified with Nu, and cites a late writer reporting that the Egyptians called the inundation itself Noun. Every summer the river rose, the boundaries between plots vanished under the flood, and the whole valley went back to being undifferentiated water for a few weeks.
Then it withdrew, the land came back out, and the surveyors went to re-mark the fields.
That is not a metaphor for creation. To anyone standing there, it was creation, happening again on schedule. The primeval water was not a story about the distant past. It was an annual event with a date.
Frogs and snakes
The eight gods of Hermopolis have the strangest visual signature in Egyptian art, and once you see the logic it is hard to unsee.
The male gods are drawn with the heads of frogs or serpents. The female gods get frogs or cats.
No falcons. No lions. No bulls. Think about what you actually find when floodwater goes down and leaves mud: frogs, appearing in enormous numbers, apparently generated by the wet ground itself; and snakes in the silt. These are the animals of the receding water — creatures that seem to be produced by mud out of nothing.
For a set of gods who are the primeval swamp, it is precisely the right choice. It is also about as far from the iconography of state power as Egyptian religion gets. The oldest gods look like what you find in a ditch.
The best picture of him has no face
Nu does get depicted — as a man with a sceptre, or frog-headed with a beetle above, or snake-headed. But his defining image is not a portrait.
In the great cosmological scene, what you see is a pair of arms coming up out of the water, lifting the boat of the sun into the sky.
That is all. No body, no head, no face. The god is off-frame by necessity, because there is nothing about him to see. What you get is the gesture: the water handing the sun up every morning.
I think that is the most sophisticated image in Egyptian art. The problem of depicting a formless precondition is genuinely unsolvable, and rather than solve it they showed only the point of contact — the moment the shapeless thing touches the world and does something for it.
No temple, anywhere
For a god this fundamental, Nu has no cult. No temple, no priesthood, no festival, nobody praying to him for anything.
Which is worth sitting with, because it separates two things we tend to run together. Importance and worship are not the same axis in Egyptian religion. Nu is structurally necessary to every creation account in the country and nobody ever built him a shrine, because there is nothing to ask a precondition for.
Except that in a sense every temple did have one. The sacred lake in a temple precinct — the pool of still water kept on the grounds — was understood to be Nu. Not a symbol of him. Him.
So the arrangement, if you were an Egyptian priest, was this: the world is a set of distinctions holding steady in something that has no distinctions at all, the river reminds you of the terms once a year, and there is a pool of the original water in the courtyard where you work.
Overview
Before there was anything, there was water — dark, still, boundless, and going nowhere. That is Nu.
He is not an ocean god. He is not a god who lives in water. He is the water, and more precisely he is the inertness of it: the condition of things before anything begins. Budge gets at it through a piece of wordplay in the creation text, where the creator says he raised the gods "out of the watery mass (nu) out of inactivity (nen)," and concludes: "Nu was the inert mass of watery matter from which the world was created" [budge-1904].
Everything else in Egyptian religion happens inside him. The sun rises out of him each morning and sets back toward him each night. He was never destroyed at creation and never will be. He is still there, underneath and around, and the Egyptians knew it.
Attestation history
Old Kingdom — a secure locus. Nu is named in Budge's list of "the great gods who were certainly worshipped in the early archaic period" as made known by the Pyramid Texts at Sakkara, at Unas 199 [budge-1904]. He stands there alongside Ptah, Horus, Neith, Ra, Hathor, Kheper, Khnemu and Sebek.
Budge glosses him in that list as "the watery mass of heaven" [budge-1904] — not the abyss below the world but the water above it, which is a different and less familiar reading than the one his later Ogdoad section implies. Both are in the same volume. See open threads.
None of the other seven is in that roster. Naunet, Hehu, Hehut, Kekui, Kekuit, Kerh and Kerhet are absent from Budge's Pyramid Text god-list entirely. The primeval water has an Old Kingdom attestation; the eightfold company does not — which bears directly on Brugsch's and Budge's claim that the Ogdoad predates the Heliopolitan system. Set out on the group page.
The Ogdoad. Nu is the first of the eight primeval gods of Khemennu — Hermopolis, the "city of the Eight Gods." Budge names the set: "Nu, Nut, Hehu, Hehut, Kekui, Kekuit, Kerh, and Kerhet" [budge-1904], four male–female pairs, with Thoth placed at their head.
Ra comes out of him. Budge is unequivocal about what the texts support: "That the sun was the product of the primeval watery mass of Nu the Egyptians believed beyond doubt, because they declared repeatedly that Ra came forth from Nu" [budge-1904].
He is equally clear about what they do not support, and the caution is important enough to quote: the Egyptians "did not, as far as we know, make it to be the dwelling-place of a primeval spirit (Urgeist) which designed and planned the future world in its mind before it began to create it" [budge-1904]. Budge is refusing Brugsch's reading of an intelligent creative spirit brooding on the water. Nu does not think. Nu is what there is before thinking.
In the creation narrative. Shu and Tefnut "were raised up from out of Nu wherein they had been"; the creator makes his forms "by means of the god-soul which I raised up out of Nu, out of a state of inertness" [budge-1904]. The first act is not making something from nothing — it is raising something out of something that was already there and doing nothing.
Later — absorbed upward. Nu becomes a component of the great syncretic gods. Budge records of Osiris that "his essence was that of the primeval god Nu" [budge-1904], and the Nesi-Khensu litany addresses Amen-Ra as "the god Nu, the prince who advanceth at his hour to vivify that which cometh forth upon his potter's wheel" [budge-1904].
What the texts say
The name is an abyss, not a youth. Budge compares the name to the Coptic ⲛⲟⲩⲛ, "abyss, deep," and rejects Brugsch's proposal that it means "young": "it is difficult to see how in that case it can mean 'young'" [budge-1904]. He prefers the nu / nen pun — water and inactivity — as the real clue.
He is the Nile as well as the abyss. "The ocean and also the Nile were identified with Nu" [budge-1904], and Budge cites Horapollo, who reports that the Egyptians called the inundation Noun. The theological abstraction and the annual flood are the same word. Once a year the primeval water came back over the fields, and it was not a metaphor for anybody watching it.
Creation is subtraction, not addition. This is the point Nu forces, and it runs against the usual expectation. Nothing is conjured. The material was always there. What creation does is separate — raise a mound out of the flood, part sky from earth, divide light from the dark that lay on the water. Every Egyptian creation account is a story about making distinctions in something undifferentiated.
Which is also why Nu never goes away. You cannot destroy the thing you made distinctions in. He is under the world permanently, and the flood every year is a reminder of the terms.
A caution Budge states and this corpus should repeat. Writing about the creation material, Budge warns that "for many of the ancient Egyptian views on the subject of the Creation our only authorities are compositions which, in the forms in which we know them, are not older than the period of the end of the Middle Empire and that of the beginning of the New Empire" [budge-1904]. The creation texts are late. This directly supports the dating flag on atum.
Iconography
Three forms, per Budge [budge-1904]:
- A man holding a sceptre, when he stands in the company of Amen.
- Frog-headed, with a beetle above the head — the frog being the standard
Ogdoad marker for the male members.
- Snake-headed.
His most famous image is not a portrait at all. In the great cosmological scene, Nu appears as a pair of arms rising out of the water, lifting the solar barque into the sky at dawn. The god is off-frame by definition; what you see is the water handing the sun up.
Cult and practice
No temple, no priesthood, no festival. Nu is a theological principle rather than a deity anyone petitioned, and the sources here record no cult of him anywhere — remarkable for a god this fundamental, and a useful demonstration that importance and worship are separate axes in Egyptian religion.
His institutional presence is at Hermopolis, as first of the Eight, in a company whose leadership Budge thinks was appropriated: "there is no proof whatsoever that Thoth was the original leader of this company of gods; on the contrary, there is reason for thinking that if the Eight ever had a leader in the beginning of their existence he must have been a form of the Sun-god" [budge-1904].
Practically, the sacred lake at a temple represented Nu — every temple precinct kept a pool of the primeval water on the premises.
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, archaic-gods list from the Pyramid Texts, Unas 199 | Nu among the great gods certainly worshipped in the early archaic period |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, same list | Nu glossed as "the watery mass of heaven" |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, on the paut of Hermopolis | Nu first of the eight gods of Khemennu: Nu, Nut, Hehu, Hehut, Kekui, Kekuit, Kerh, Kerhet |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, ch. on the Creation | "Ra came forth from Nu," declared repeatedly; Shu and Tefnut raised up out of Nu |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, ch. on the Creation, p. 309 | the *nu* / *nen* wordplay — "out of the watery mass, out of inactivity" |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, on Osiris | "His essence was that of the primeval god Nu" |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, Nesi-Khensu litany | Amen-Ra addressed as "the god Nu, the prince who advanceth at his hour" |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, on the name | Coptic ⲛⲟⲩⲛ "abyss, deep"; Brugsch's "young" rejected; Horapollo on the inundation called *Noun* |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* I, on the Eight | Nu frog-headed with a beetle, or snake-headed, or a man with a sceptre |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vols I–II. Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md), but note that on this subject Budge is unusually careful — he explicitly limits what the texts will support and dates the creation compositions late.[horapollo]— Horapollo, Hieroglyphica I. 21, cited by Budge (Leemans ed., p. 28). Late antique and unreliable on hieroglyphs generally; used here only for the reported Egyptian name of the inundation.[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open questions
- ~~Get a Pyramid Text locus~~ — closed 2026-07-29: Unas 199, in Budge's list of gods certainly worshipped in the early archaic period. Verify against Sethe.
- Reconcile "the watery mass of heaven" with the abyss reading. Budge's Pyramid Text gloss puts Nu above the world; his Ogdoad section puts him beneath it as the inert deep. Both are in volume I. Either Egyptian usage covered both, or one is Budge being careless — and the difference matters, because water overhead and water underneath are different cosmologies.
- Verify the nu / nen wordplay in a modern lexicon; the whole reading of Nu as inertness rather than merely water depends on it.
- Find the Horapollo passage in a modern edition and check the transmission of Noun.
- Get a museum or publication reference for the arms-out-of-the-water solar-barque scene; it is the defining image and is cited here from general knowledge of the type, not from an archived source. Do not describe a specific example until this is done.
- Confirm the sacred-lake-as-Nu identification with a temple text. It is standard in the literature and unsourced here.
- Establish when Nu is first absorbed into Amen-Ra; the Nesi-Khensu litany is Twenty-first Dynasty and there are probably earlier instances.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ●full — Multiple attestations across periods.
"Nu", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded full, retrieved 2026-08-10.