The Five Days, and the Goddess on the Coffin Lid

Nut stands at the origin of the chief gods of Egyptian myth. In the story of the epagomenal days, the sun god had decreed that Nut could give birth on no day of the year; the god Thoth won extra light from the moon and made five additional days outside the calendar, and on these Nut bore Osiris, Horus the elder, Set, Isis and Nephthys, the deities on whom the great Osiris cycle turns.

Because she received the sun and the dead into her body each night and gave them new birth each morning, Nut became a goddess of rebirth and protection for the deceased. She is frequently painted on the inner lids of coffins and on tomb ceilings, arching protectively over the body so that the dead person lies, in effect, within the sky-mother, to be reborn with the sun. Few images express Egyptian hope for the afterlife more directly than the star-covered goddess spread across the underside of a coffin.