Creation & the First Mound
In the beginning, a single hill of dry land rose from the endless dark water.
Also: creation · cosmogony · primeval mound · first hill · benben · world's origin
Egyptians pictured the beginning of the world as a mound of dry land rising out of the dark waters of Nun, with a self-created god appearing upon it to bring forth the cosmos. They did not have one single creation story but several, told at different temple cities, each making its own god the first principle. All shared the image of order emerging from a watery, formless beginning.
In short
The Egyptian conception of the world's origin from the primeval waters — typically the emergence of a first mound of land and a self-developing creator who brings the ordered cosmos into being.
Where it’s found
Pyramid Texts; Coffin Texts; later temple cosmologies
Read it in the Egyptian texts
The passages in our corpus where this idea is discussed — each opens in our reader with the Egyptian transliteration and the English translation side by side.
How the idea developed across Egypt
The mound image underlies the Heliopolitan, Hermopolitan, and Memphite cosmogonies; attested from the Pyramid Texts; temple architecture and the benben stone echo the primeval-mound idea.
Egyptian creation theology is plural; the Heliopolitan, Hermopolitan, and Memphite accounts are distinct and given their own entries.