Khepri
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| Khepri | |||||
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| God of rebirth, the sunrise and scarab. Ra's aspect in the morning | |||||
Khepri is often represented as a scarab, or a scarab-headed man, holding aloft the morning sun.
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| Name in hieroglyphs |
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| Major cult center | Heliopolis[citation needed] | ||||
| Symbol | scarab beetle, blue lotus | ||||
| Siblings | Atum, Ra | ||||
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| Khepri in hieroglyphs |
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Khepri (also spelled Khepera, Kheper, Khepra, Chepri) is a god in the ancient Egyptian religion.
Symbolism
Khepri was connected with the scarab beetle (kheprer), because the scarab rolls balls of dung across the ground, an act that the Egyptians saw as a symbol of the forces that move the sun across the sky. Khepri was thus a solar deity. Young dung beetles, having been laid as eggs within the dung ball, emerge from it fully formed. Therefore, Khepri also represented creation and rebirth, and he was specifically connected with the rising sun and the mythical creation of the world. The Egyptians connected his name with the Egyptian language verb kheper, meaning "develop" or "come into being".[1] Kheper, (or Xeper) is a transcription of an ancient Egyptian word meaning to come into being, to change, to occur, to happen, to exist, to bring about, to create, etc. Egyptologists typically transliterate the word as ?pr. Both Kheper and Xeper possess the same phonetic value and are pronounced as "kheffer".
Religion
There was no cult devoted to Khepri, and he was largely subordinate to the greater sun god Ra. Often, Khepri and another solar deity, Atum, were seen as aspects of Ra: Khepri was the morning sun, Ra was the midday sun, and Atum was the sun in the evening.[1]
Appearance
Khepri was principally depicted as a scarab beetle, though in some tomb paintings and funerary papyri he is represented as a human male with a scarab as a head. He is also depicted as a scarab in a solar barque held aloft by Nun. The scarab amulets that the Egyptians used as jewelry and as seals represent Khepri.[2]
References
External links
Media related to Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. at Wikimedia Commons
