The gods of Anubis City

The Egyptians worshipped hundreds of gods over three thousand years and never wrote one sacred book that settled who was who. A god could merge with another — Amun and Ra became Amun-Ra — or gain a different family in the next town down the river. So almost every myth comes in versions, and each page says where they disagree.

Creation is a good example. The priests of Heliopolis taught that the sun god rose from the waters of chaos and made the first gods himself. In Hermopolis the world began with eight primeval gods: the town’s Egyptian name, Khmunu, means “City of the Eight”. In Memphis the creator was Ptah, who made everything by thought and word. That text survives on the Shabaka Stone in the British Museum, which someone later used as a millstone.

Anubis City is named after the guardian of the dead, so Anubis came first. Thoth, the god of reckoning, got the blackjack hall. Seshat, who wrote down numbers for the gods, got bingo. Hathor, the lady of music and dance, got the club, and Ra, the sun, got the slot machines and the golden boat at the quay. Horus, the falcon of kingship, looks down from the pylon of the temple where poker is played.

The buildings are our invention — no Egyptian temple ever had a roulette wheel on its front; the city guide shows them all. The gods, their emblems and their stories are real, and that is what these pages are about.

We work from museum records (the British Museum, the Met, the Louvre), Britannica and two standard books by Egyptologists: Richard H. Wilkinson’s “The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt” and Geraldine Pinch’s “Egyptian Mythology”. Each page lists its sources at the end. When a story is known only from a Greek writer rather than from Egyptian texts, we say so.