When the Producer is the Product: The Demiurge’s Self-Genesis in the Egyptian New Kingdom’s Religious Hymns (ca. 1539–1077 BC)

The present paper constitutes a brief preliminary approach to the Creator’s self-genesis in the Egyptian New Kingdom religious hymns (ca. 1539–1077 BC) in the context of an on-going PhD research on the Creator deity and creation in the New Kingdom’s hymnology. This feature is referred to in numerous different manners in this corpus, which might be grouped into three main categories—self-emanation/manifestation, self-begetting/birth, and self-cast/construction—through which the present paper is structured. The term xpr is fundamental regarding the first, as it conveys the idea of “coming to existence” or “assuming/taking shape”. As for the second category, one finds attestations of the deity’s self-creation rendered by an allusion to biological processes, where the Creator would have engendered (wtT) and given birth (msj) to himself. Finally, the third group relates to manual/craftwork with the use of different terms such as qd. However, it will be argued that these groups are not to be taken as entirely separate units but rather as operative categories. Msj, for instance, might refer to both a biological process and a manual task. To sum up, this paper deals with the phraseology employed to depict the Creator’s self-coming into existence in this corpus, navigating its diversity and taking its complexity into account.