A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work.
Ur-pehui-f
a name in Budge's list of the Gods of the Book of the Dead
Overview
He is a line in a catalogue, and the catalogue is the only thing that has him.
Budge closes The Gods of the Egyptians II with a long compilation headed "GODS OF THE BOOK OF THE DEAD" — a name, then its hieroglyphic writing, then the next name, for page after page. Ur-pehui-f sits on p. 328 between Ur-at and Ur-maat:
Unen-nefer · Un-hat · Unti · Ur-at · Ur-pehui-f · Ur-maat · Ur-maat-s · Ur-mertu-s-teshert-sheui · Ur-hekau · User-ab · User-ba · Usert [budge-1904]
No chapter, no scene, no gloss, no translation. Budge does not say which spell the name comes from, and the corpus has searched every other archived source for it and found nothing.
Why the neighbours prove nothing — and why they prove less than usual
The corpus already holds that adjacency in an index is not membership in a set (C395). This list makes the point harder than the ordinary case, because it is not alphabetical.
Read the run again: at · pehui · maat · maat-s · mertu · hekau. In Latin order that is scrambled. Budge is sorting by the Egyptian writing — the sign-groups in the second column — so what looks like an alphabetical neighbourhood is a palaeographic one.
Two names next to each other here may share nothing but a hieroglyph. The list orders signs, not gods, and any inference drawn across it is weaker than it looks.
That said, the run is full of real deities. Unen-nefer is Osiris under his commonest epithet. Ur-hekau is the ritual instrument of the Opening of the Mouth that this corpus has already audited out of the divine census (ur-heka, C394). The same list holds a great god, a piece of ritual equipment, and this name. That is the honest summary of what membership is worth.
What the name might mean, said as a guess
Ur is "great" and pehui is "hind parts, the end, the rear." Great of his hind parts would be an odd but not impossible divine name — the Book of the Dead is full of gods named for a body part, and the corpus already holds several. Budge offers no translation and this one is not offered as an answer. It is recorded so that a reader who meets the name elsewhere has something to test.
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* II, "**Gods of the Book of the Dead**," **p. 328** | **Ur-pehui-f**, name and hieroglyphs, between **Ur-at** and **Ur-maat** |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. II. Public domain, archived. The compiled list is his own, assembled from the Book of the Dead; he gives no chapter references in it, which is exactly what makes the names in it hard to run down.
Open questions
- Find the chapter. Budge built this list from somewhere. His own three-volume Book of the Dead is on disk and does not contain the name in English — so either it is in a chapter he translated under a different spelling, or it comes from a papyrus outside that edition.
- Read the hieroglyphs. The second column is the actual evidence and this corpus cannot yet read it. A transliteration from the signs would settle the name independent of Budge's romanisation — which has already been wrong often enough to cost entries.
- Establish the sort order of the whole list. If it really is by sign-group, that is worth writing up on the epithet trap page: it changes what "next to" means for every name in ten pages of catalogue.
- How many of the list's names are in the census at all? A count would put a number on C397 rather than an impression.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Ur-pehui-f", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.