Nut

Nut is the ancient Egyptian goddess of the sky, and one of the most vivid images in all Egyptian art: a woman arched over the earth on her fingertips and toes, her long body forming the vault of heaven and often spangled with stars. She is the daughter of Shu, the air, and Tefnut, the moisture, and the sister and wife of Geb, the earth. In the cosmogony her father Shu holds her aloft, separating the sky from the earth below and creating the space of air in which life goes on, so that the arch of Nut over the reclining Geb is a picture of the world's basic structure. Each evening Nut was believed to swallow the sun, which passed through her body during the night, to be given birth again from between her thighs at dawn; the same was imagined for the stars.

Nut's funerary role is old and textually dense: spells in both the Pyramid Texts, carved in Old Kingdom royal burial chambers, and the later Coffin Texts call on her to shield the dead with her arms, reassemble their bones, and give birth to them anew into the afterlife, and one spell has the deceased addressed as being given "to your mother Nut in her name of Sarcophagus, she has embraced you in her name of Coffin," a direct identification of the goddess with the burial container itself. This is why her image was so often painted on the inner lid of a coffin or the underside of a sarcophagus lid, positioned so that, once closed, she faced the mummy directly and enclosed the dead within her own starry body, a practice attested across a very long span of Egyptian funerary art.

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.