<P> Among the most important myths were those describing the creation of the world . The Egyptian developed many accounts of the creation, which differ greatly in the events they describe . In particular, the deities credited with creating the world vary in each account . This difference partly reflects the desire of Egypt's cities and priesthoods to exalt their own patron gods by attributing creation to them . Yet the differing accounts were not regarded as contradictory; instead, the Egyptians saw the creation process as having many aspects and involving many divine forces . </P> <P> One common feature of the myths is the emergence of the world from the waters of chaos that surround it . This event represents the establishment of maat and the origin of life . One fragmentary tradition centers on the eight gods of the Ogdoad, who represent the characteristics of the primeval water itself . Their actions give rise to the sun (represented in creation myths by various gods, especially Ra), whose birth forms a space of light and dryness within the dark water . The sun rises from the first mound of dry land, another common motif in the creation myths, which was likely inspired by the sight of mounds of earth emerging as the Nile flood receded . With the emergence of the sun god, the establisher of maat, the world has its first ruler . Accounts from the first millennium BC focus on the actions of the creator god in subduing the forces of chaos that threaten the newly ordered world . </P> <P> Atum, a god closely connected with the sun and the primeval mound, is the focus of a creation myth dating back at least to the Old Kingdom . Atum, who incorporates all the elements of the world, exists within the waters as a potential being . At the time of creation he emerges to produce other gods, resulting in a set of nine deities, the Ennead, which includes Geb, Nut, and other key elements of the world . The Ennead can by extension stand for all the gods, so its creation represents the differentiation of Atum's unified potential being into the multiplicity of elements present within the world . </P> <P> Over time, the Egyptians developed more abstract perspectives on the creation process . By the time of the Coffin Texts, they described the formation of the world as the realization of a concept first developed within the mind of the creator god . The force of heka, or magic, which links things in the divine realm and things in the physical world, is the power that links the creator's original concept with its physical realization . Heka itself can be personified as a god, but this intellectual process of creation is not associated with that god alone . An inscription from the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1070--664 BC), whose text may be much older, describes the process in detail and attributes it to the god Ptah, whose close association with craftsmen makes him a suitable deity to give a physical form to the original creative vision . Hymns from the New Kingdom describe the god Amun, a mysterious power that lies behind even the other gods, as the ultimate source of this creative vision . </P>

The symbol for the royalty that ruled a particular region in egypt