Geb

Geb is the Egyptian earth-god, and Egypt is unusual in making the earth male and the sky, Nut, female, the reverse of the Greek arrangement. He is shown reclining beneath the arched, star-spangled body of Nut, the two held forever apart by Shu, the air, in an image Egyptian cosmology used to explain the space in which life happens.

As the ground itself, Geb's laughter was said to be the trembling of earthquakes, and because the dead are buried in him he had an underworld aspect, holding the deceased and, in the Book of the Dead, capable of imprisoning those who failed their judgment. He is father of Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys, and so ancestor of the drama of kingship; the throne of Egypt was called the throne of Geb, and the living king its heir.

Geb's most distinctive epithet, the Great Cackler, ties him to a cosmogonic tradition in which a primordial egg, from which the sun or a first bird emerged, was laid amid a great cackling, a myth that made Geb, as the earth itself, the ultimate source of the egg and so, in some tellings, of creation. The epithet recurs in funerary literature such as the Coffin Texts, where invoking Geb by this name calls on his primal, world-founding aspect rather than his everyday role as the solid ground. Because the dead were interred within Geb's own body, ritual texts extended his function into the embalming process itself, treating the earth-god as a participant in, rather than merely the setting for, the preservation of the dead.

Beyond his cosmic role as the earth itself, Geb appears in Egyptian myth in an active, judicial capacity: as the father of the contending claimants, he presides as arbiter in the long dispute between Horus and Set over the rightful kingship of Egypt, a conflict narrated at length in sources such as the New Kingdom text known as the Contendings of Horus and Set. In one stage of the story, Geb initially proposes to divide the land between the two rivals, awarding Set the desert regions associated with the god's own fierce, arid character and giving Horus the fertile Delta, a compromise meant to satisfy both claims without declaring an outright winner.

Later in the tradition, and reflected in the standard royal ideology of later periods, Geb's judgment moves further and he awards the whole of the unified Two Lands to Horus as the legitimate heir, confirming him as king and Set as excluded, a resolution that matches the historical ideology of pharaonic kingship in which the reigning king is Horus and the throne itself is called the throne of Geb. This judicial role fits naturally with his broader character: as the ground on which the two kingdoms literally rest, the earth-god is the fitting authority to decide how the earth should be divided, and the mythic image of Geb apportioning Egypt between rival heirs echoes, in miniature, the same conflict over inheritance and succession that runs through the rest of his own family's mythology from Osiris and Set onward.