title: Half-Life 2

text: Like the original "Half-Life" (1998), "Half-Life 2" is a single-player first-person shooter in which players control Gordon Freeman. It has similar mechanics to "Half-Life", including health-and-weapon systems (though with less overall weapons) and periodic physics puzzles, except with the newer Source engine and improved graphics. The player also starts without items, slowly building up their arsenal over the course of the game. Despite the game's mainly linear nature, much effort was put into making exploration rewarding and interesting; many optional areas can be missed or avoided.


title: Half-Life 2

text: A diverse set of enemies is present, which usually require being approached with different tactics: some coordinate in groups to out-maneuver or out-position the player; others, such as the Manhack, fly directly at the player through small openings and tight corridors. Others use predictable but powerful attacks, while others hide before swiftly attacking the player. Gordon can kill most enemies with his weapons, or make use of indirect means, exploiting environmental hazards such as explosive pressurized canisters, gas fires or improvised traps. In chapter 10 and 11 of the game, Gordon can be joined by up to four armed Resistance soldiers or medics and can send his team further from him or call them back.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Many of the game's new features utilize the source engines's detailed physics simulation. Two sections of the game involve driving vehicles. Instead of button-oriented puzzles from "Half-Life", environmental puzzles are also introduced with makeshift mechanical systems, revolving around the player's new ability to pick up, move, and place objects. Solutions involve objects' physical properties, such as shape, weight, and buoyancy. For example; In chapter three, "Route Kanal", the player is required to stack cinder blocks on a makeshift see-saw ramp to proceed over a wall. Alternatively, the player can build a crude staircase with the blocks, so the puzzle may be solved in multiple ways.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Part-way through the game, Gordon acquires the Gravity Gun, which allows him to draw distant objects towards himself or forcefully push them away, as well as the ability to manipulate larger and heavier objects that he cannot control without the weapon. These abilities are required to solve puzzles later in the game, and can also be used to great effect in combat, as any non-static object within proximity to the player has the potential to be used as a makeshift defense, such as a file cabinet, or a deadly projectile, such as a gasoline can or buzzsaw blade. The player can learn this through cleverly placed hints in the environment.


title: Half-Life 2

text: The game never separates the player with pre-rendered cutscenes or events; the story proceeds via exposition from other characters and in-world events, and the player can control Gordon for the entirety of the game. Much of the backstory to the game is simply alluded to or told through the environment. Even tutorials are mostly placed in the environment or in dialogue. The few pop-ups that actually appear only tell the player keybindings for actions.


title: Half-Life 2

text: "Half-Life 2" takes place approximately twenty years after the incident at the Black Mesa Research Facility from the first game, in which scientists accidentally opened a portal to the hostile dimension Xen. The game begins with Gordon Freeman being awoken from stasis by the mysterious G-Man (Michael Shapiro) who reveals that the Black Mesa incident attracted the attention of a multidimensional empire called the Combine, which conquered Earth in seven hours. The Combine have implemented a brutal police state by biologically assimilating humans and other species, including the peaceful Vortigaunts (Louis Gossett Jr. and Tony Todd). The G-Man inserts Gordon into a train arriving at City 17, the site of the Combine Citadel, where Dr. Wallace Breen (Robert Culp), the former Black Mesa administrator who negotiated Earth's surrender governs as the Combine's puppet ruler.


title: Half-Life 2

text: After eluding the Combine forces, Gordon joins a resistance led by former Black Mesa scientist Dr. Eli Vance (Robert Guillaume), which also includes Vance's daughter Alyx (Merle Dandridge), former Black Mesa security guard Barney Calhoun (Shapiro), who works undercover as a Civil Protection officer, and another Black Mesa scientist, Dr. Isaac Kleiner (Harry S. Robins). After a failed attempt to teleport to the resistance base, Black Mesa East, from Kleiner's makeshift laboratory, Gordon progresses on foot through the city's canal system. The teleportation attempt accidentally alerts Breen and the Combine to Freeman's return, leading to them sending forces to attack him. He obtains an airboat and battles through sewers and rivers.


title: Half-Life 2

text: At Black Mesa East, Gordon is reintroduced to Eli and meets another resistance scientist, Dr. Judith Mossman (Michelle Forbes). Alyx introduces Gordon to her pet robot, Dog, and gives him the gravity gun, an instrument that can manipulate large objects. When the base is attacked by Combine forces, Eli and Mossman are captured and taken to the Combine detention facility Nova Prospekt. Separated from Alyx, Gordon detours through the zombie-infested town of Ravenholm, aided by its last survivor, Father Grigori (Jim French). Escaping the town, Gordon discovers a resistance outpost. He uses a customized dune buggy to travel a crumbling coastal road to Nova Prospekt, fighting off alien antlions, and helping the resistance fend off Combine raids.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Gordon breaks into Nova Prospekt and reunites with Alyx. They locate Eli but discover that Mossman is a Combine informant. Before they can stop her, Mossman teleports herself and Eli back to City 17's Citadel. The Combine teleporter explodes moments after Gordon and Alyx use it to escape Nova Prospekt.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Returning to Kleiner's lab, Gordon and Alyx learn that the teleporter malfunctioned and that a week has passed. In their absence, the resistance has mobilized against the Combine. With the aid of Dog and Barney, Gordon fights his way inside the Citadel. A security system inadvertently supercharges Gordon's gravity gun, allowing him to fight his way up the Citadel.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Gordon is captured in a Combine transport pod and taken to Breen's office, where he and Mossman are waiting with Eli and Alyx in captivity. Breen explains his plans to further conquer humanity with the Combine, contrary to what he told Mossman. Angry, Mossman frees Gordon, Alyx, and Eli before Breen can teleport them off-world. Breen tries to escape through a teleporter, but Gordon destroys its reactor with energy orbs launched from a gravity gun, killing Breen. Just as the reactor explodes, the G-Man reappears and freezes time. He praises Gordon's work and mentions offers for Gordon's "services", before placing him back into stasis.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Development of "Half-Life 2" began in June 1999, six months after the release of the original "Half-Life". It was developed by a team of 82. With voice actors included, this number is 100. Valve's president, Gabe Newell, wanted to redefine the FPS genre, saying: "Why spend four years of your life building something that isn't innovative and is basically pointless? If "Half-Life 2" isn't viewed as the best PC game of all time, it's going to completely bum out most of the guys on this team." Newell gave his team no deadline and a "virtually unlimited" budget, promising to fund the project himself if necessary. The game was built with Valve's new in-house game engine, Source, developed simultaneously.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Whereas "Half-Life" was set in a single location, the Black Mesa research facility, Valve wanted "a much more epic and global feel" for the sequel. One concept had the player teleporting between planets, which was discarded as it would make continuity between levels difficult. At the suggestion of the Bulgarian art director Viktor Antonov, the team settled on a city in an Eastern European location. In this early concept, players would start the game by boarding the "Borealis", an icebreaker bound for the city. Nova Prospekt was conceived as a small rail depot built on an old prison in the wasteland and grew from a stopping-off point to the destination itself.


title: Half-Life 2

text: After observing how players had connected to minor characters in "Half-Life", the team developed the characterization, with more detailed character models and realistic animation. The animator Ken Birdwell studied the work of psychologist Paul Ekman, who had researched how facial muscles express emotion. The writer Marc Laidlaw created family relationships between the characters, saying as it was a "basic dramatic unit everyone understands" rarely used in games.


title: Half-Life 2

text: The team integrated the Havok physics engine, which simulates real-world physics, to reinforce the player's sense of presence and create new gameplay. To experiment, the team created a minigame, Zombie Basketball, in which players used a physics-manipulating gun to throw zombies through hoops. In mid-2001, to test the engine, Valve built a street war between rioting citizens and police, featuring tanks, Molotov cocktails, hand-to-hand fighting, and looting. The designer John Guthrie described it as "an early attempt at getting something "–" anything "–" in the game that used non-player characters and physics".


title: Half-Life 2

text: In late 2001, Valve began creating a showreel, hoping to demonstrate it at E3 2002. For several months, Newell let the team work without his input so he could provide unbiased feedback, and focused on developing Steam, Valve's upcoming digital distribution service. The team presented the showreel to Newell, showcasing physics, environments such as the "Borealis", and a dialogue-heavy scene with the scientist character Dr. Kleiner. Newell felt the showreel did not adequately show how the physics would affect gameplay and that the Kleiner scene was overlong. Reflecting on the failure, Laidlaw said: "The dramatic scenes with the characters are important, but they have to be in service of the interactivity and gameplay."


title: Half-Life 2

text: In September 2002, the team completed a second showreel, featuring a buggy race along the City 17 coast, an encounter with headcrabs on a pier, an alien strider attacking the city, and a greatly shortened Kleiner sequence. In October, Newell told the team they would announce "Half-Life 2" at E3 2003 and release it by the end of the year. As with the original "Half-Life", the team split into "cabals" working on different levels. Designers created levels using placeholder shapes and surfaces, which then were worked on by the artists. Valve announced "Half-Life 2" at E3 2003, with demonstrations of the characters, animation, and physics. The reaction was positive, and the game won the E3 Game of the Show award. Newell also announced a release date, September 30, 2003, hoping this would motivate the team. They worked long hours to meet the deadline, but by July it had become clear they would miss it. Rumors spread of a delay, but Valve made no announcement until September 23, when they released a statement targeting a "holiday" release, leading to fan backlash.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Newell had been hesitant to announce a delay without a new release date. He said later: "We were paralyzed. We knew we weren't going to make the date we promised, and that was going to be a huge fiasco and really embarrassing. But we didn't have a new date to give people either." The graphics card manufacturer ATI had arranged a promotional event on Alcatraz to coincide with the planned release of "Half-Life 2"; Newell, unable to pull out of the event, gave a prepared speech, demonstrated the Source engine, and left without addressing questions.


title: Half-Life 2

text: On September 19, the "Half-Life 2" source code was obtained by a German hacker, Axel Gembe, who had infiltrated Valve's internal network months earlier. According to Gembe, he shared it with another person, who leaked the code online in early October. Fans soon compiled a playable version of "Half-Life 2", revealing how unfinished it was. The leaks damaged morale at Valve and slowed development. In March 2004, Gembe contacted Newell and identified himself, saying he was a fan and had not acted maliciously. Newell worked with the FBI to invite Gembe to a fake job interview, planning to have him arrested in the United States; however, police arrested him in Germany. In November 2006, Gembe was sentenced to three years' probation.


title: Half-Life 2

text: In 2004, the development team returned after Christmas to long hours, stressful working conditions, and no guarantee that the game, which was costing $1 million a month to develop, would be finished soon. However, Newell felt that progress was speeding up, with the team producing about three hours of gameplay per month. In March, they created the first version playable from start to finish and stopped production for a week to play through the game. Major changes by this point included the cutting of the "Borealis" sequence, the replacement of the jet ski with a hovercraft, and the physics-manipulating gravity gun being introduced earlier in the game. Feedback was positive across the company. Newell recalled: "The fact that you could go from one end of the game to the other was a really big thing for us. Then we knew it just had to get better "–" but it was all there." After several months of bug fixes and playtesting, "Half-Life 2" was completed on October 13, 2004.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Valve made a 1GB portion of "Half-Life 2" available for download in an encrypted format through Steam on August 26, 2004. On the day of release, Steam customers were able to pay, unlock the files, and play the game immediately, without having to wait for the game to download. In retail, distribution of the game was handled by Vivendi Universal Games through their Sierra Entertainment subsidiary.


title: Half-Life 2

text: "Half-Life 2" was simultaneously released through Steam, CD, and on DVD in several editions. Through Steam, "Half-Life 2" had three packages that a customer could order. The basic version ("Bronze") includes only "Half-Life 2" and "Counter-Strike: Source", whereas the "Silver" and "Gold" (collector's edition) versions also include "" (ports of the original "Half-Life" and "Day of Defeat" mod to the new engine). The collector's edition/"Gold" version additionally includes merchandise, such as a baseball cap, a strategy guide and CD containing the soundtrack used in "Half-Life 2". Both the disc and Steam versions require Steam to be installed and active for play to occur. The retail copies of the game came in two versions, standard and Collector's Edition. The Collector's Edition differed from the physical items in the "Gold" edition, and included a T-shirt and sample of the Prima strategy guide.


title: Half-Life 2

text: A demo version with the file size of a single CD was made available in December 2004 at the web site of graphics card manufacturer ATI Technologies, who teamed up with Valve for the game. The demo contains a portion of two chapters: "Point Insertion" and ""We Don't Go To Ravenholm..."". In September 2005, Electronic Arts distributed the "Game of the Year" edition of "Half-Life 2". Compared to the original CD-release of "Half-Life 2", the "Game of the Year" edition also includes "Half-Life: Source".


title: Half-Life 2

text: The soundtrack was written by Kelly Bailey. "The Soundtrack of Half-Life 2", containing most of the music from "Half-Life 2" and many tracks from the original "Half-Life", was included with the "Half-Life 2" "Gold" edition and sold separately from Valve's online store. Valve released a in 2004.


title: Half-Life 2

text: On September 20, 2004, "GameSpot" reported that Sierra's parent company, Vivendi Universal Games, was in a legal battle with Valve over the distribution of "Half-Life 2" to cyber cafés. At this time, cyber cafés were important for the Asian PC gaming market where PC and broadband penetration per capita were much lower (except Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan).


title: Half-Life 2

text: According to Vivendi Universal Games, the distribution contract they signed with Valve included cyber cafés. This would mean that only Vivendi Universal Games could distribute "Half-Life 2" to cyber cafés — not Valve through the Steam system. On November 29, 2004, Judge Thomas S. Zilly, of U.S. Federal District Court in Seattle, Washington, ruled that Vivendi Universal Games and its affiliates are not authorized to distribute (directly or indirectly) Valve games through cyber cafés to end users for pay-to-play activities according to the parties' current publishing agreement. Also, Judge Zilly ruled in favor of the Valve motion regarding the contractual limitation of liability, allowing Valve to recover copyright damages for any infringement as allowed by law without regard to the publishing agreement's limitation of liability clause.


title: Half-Life 2

text: On April 29, 2005, the two parties announced a settlement agreement. Vivendi Universal Games would cease distributing all retail packaged versions of Valve games by August 31, 2005. Vivendi Universal Games also was to notify distributors and cyber cafés that had been licensed by Vivendi Universal Games that only Valve had the authority to distribute cyber café licenses, and hence their licenses were revoked and switched to Valve's. Valve subsequently partnered with Electronic Arts for the retail distribution of its games, including the forthcoming Xbox version of "Half-Life 2".


title: Half-Life 2

text: In 2005, Valve released an extra level, "", as a free download to anyone who purchased "Half-Life 2". On December 22, Valve released a 64-bit version of the Source engine for x86-64 processor-based systems running Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows Server 2003 x64, Windows Vista x64, or Windows Server 2008 x64. This update enabled "Half-Life 2" and other Source games to run natively on 64-bit processors, bypassing the 32-bit compatibility layer. Newell said it was "an important step in the evolution of our game content and tools", and that the game benefited greatly from the update. Some users reported major performance boosts, though technology site Techgage found stability problems and no notable frame rate improvement.


title: Half-Life 2

text: In 2006, Valve partnered with Taito to release "Half-Life 2: Survivor", an arcade game version for the Japanese market. Valve rereleased "Half-Life 2" as part of the 2007 compilation "The Orange Box" for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. On May 26, 2010, "Half-Life 2" and its two episodic sequels were released for Mac OS X. In 2013, Valve ported the game to Linux, and released a free update adding support for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. An NVIDIA Shield-exclusive port for Android was released on May 12, 2014. In January 2022, a new UI designed for the Steam Deck was released through an update in the beta branch.


title: Half-Life 2

text: "Half-Life 2" has an aggregate score of 96/100 on Metacritic. Sources such as 1UP, GameSpy, "The Cincinnati Enquirer", "The New York Times", and "VideoGamer.com" gave it perfect scores, and others, such as "PC Gamer", "IGN", "GamesRadar", and "Eurogamer", gave near-perfect scores. It was the fifth game to receive ten out of ten from "Edge". Critics praised the advanced graphics and physics. "Maximum PC" awarded "Half-Life 2" 11 on their rating scale which normally peaks at 10, calling it "the best game ever made".


title: Half-Life 2

text: In the United States, "Half-Life 2"s PC version sold 680,000 copies and had earned $34.3 million by August 2006. It was the country's 17th best-selling PC game between January 2000 and August 2006. It received a "Platinum" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom. "Forbes" reported on February 9, 2011, that the game had sold 12 million copies worldwide.


title: Half-Life 2

text: In a review of "The Orange Box", IGN stated that although "Half-Life 2" has already been released through other media, the game itself is still enjoyable on a console. They also noted that the physics of "Half-Life 2" are impressive despite being a console game. However, it was noted that the graphics on the Xbox 360 version of "Half-Life 2" were not as impressive as when it was released on the PC. GameSpot's review of "The Orange Box" noticed that the content of both the Xbox 360 releases, and PlayStation 3 releases were exactly alike, the only issue with the PlayStation 3 version was that it had noticeable frame-rate hiccups. GameSpot continued to say that the frame rates issues were only minor but some consider them to be a significant irritation.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Several critics, including some that had given positive reviews, complained about the required usage of the program Steam, the requirement to create an account, register the products, and permanently lock them to the account before being allowed to play, along with installation difficulties and lack of support.


title: Half-Life 2

text: "Half-Life 2" earned 39 Game of the Year awards, including Overall Game of the Year at "IGN", "GameSpot'"s Award for Best Shooter, "GameSpot"'s Reader's Choice — PC Game of the Year Award, "Game of the Year" from the Interactive Achievement Awards and "Best Game" with the Game Developers Choice Awards, where it was also given various awards for technology, characters, and writing.


title: Half-Life 2

text: The editors of "Computer Gaming World" nominated "Half-Life 2" for their 2004 "Single-Player Shooter of the Year" and overall "Game of the Year" awards, although it lost to "Painkiller" and "World of Warcraft". They wrote, ""Half-Life 2", everyone's default pick to win this year, is indeed a fantastic roller coaster of a ride, not as great as the original but still leagues above most other shooters."


title: Half-Life 2

text: "Edge" awarded "Half-Life 2" with its top honor of the year with the award for Best Game, as well as awards for Innovation and Visual Design. The game also had a strong showing at the 2004 British Academy Video Games Awards, picking up six awards, more than any other game that night, with awards including "Best Game" and "Best Online and Multiplayer." "Computer Games Magazine" named "Half-Life 2" the fourth-best computer game of 2004. The editors call it "a masterful single-player experience that plays a constant game of one-upmanship with itself." It won the magazine's "Best Technology" (beating out "Doom 3") and "Best Writing" awards, and was a runner-up in the "Best Sound Effects", "Best AI" and "Best Voice Acting" categories.


title: Half-Life 2

text: "Guinness World Records" awarded "Half-Life 2" the world record for "Highest Rated Shooter by PC Gamer Magazine" in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008. Other records awarded the game in the book include, "Largest Digital Distribution Channel" for Valve's Steam service, "First Game to Feature a Gravity Gun", and "First PC Game to Feature Developer Commentary". In 2009, "Game Informer" put "Half-Life 2" 5th on their list of "The Top 200 Games of All Time", saying that "With "Half-Life 2", Valve redefined the way first-person shooters were created".


title: Half-Life 2

text: "Half-Life 2" was selected by readers of "The Guardian" as the best game of the decade, with praise given especially to the environment design throughout the game. According to the newspaper, it "pushed the envelope for the genre, and set a new high watermark for FPS narrative". One author commented: ""Half-Life 2" always felt like the European arthouse answer to the Hollywood bluster of "Halo" and "Call of Duty"". "Half-Life 2" won Crispy Gamer's Game of the Decade tournament style poll. It also won Reviews on the Run's, "IGN"s Best Game of the Decade and Spike Video Game Awards 2012 Game of the Decade. In December 2021, "IGN" named "Half-Life 2" the ninth-best game of all time.


title: Half-Life 2

text: Since the release of the Source engine SDK, a large number of modifications (mods) have been developed by the "Half-Life 2" community. Mods vary in scale, from fan-created levels and weapons, to partial conversions such as "Rock 24", "Half-Life 2 Substance" and "SMOD" (which modify the storyline and gameplay of the pre-existing game), SourceForts and "Garry's Mod" (which allow the player to experiment with the physics system in a sandbox mode), to total conversions such as "Black Mesa", "Dystopia", "Zombie Master" or "", the last of which transforms the game from a first-person shooter into a real-time strategy game. Some mods take place in the "Half-Life" universe; others in completely original settings. Many more mods are still in development, including "Lift", "The Myriad", "Operation Black Mesa", and the episodic single-player mod "Minerva". Several multiplayer mods, such as "Pirates, Vikings and Knights II", a predominately sword-fighting game; "", which focuses on realistic modern infantry combat; and "Jailbreak Source" have been opened to the public as a beta. As part of its community support, Valve announced in September 2008 that several mods, with more planned in the future, were being integrated into the Steamworks program, allowing the mods to make full use of Steam's distribution and update capabilities. In Sept 2022, after a decade of development, a fan made full-VR mod was released titled "Half life 2: VR".


title: Half-Life 2

text: "Half-Life 2" was followed by two episodic sequels: "" (2006) and "" (2007). After canceling "" and several further "Half-Life" projects, Valve released a prequel, "", in 2020.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Ancient Egyptian deities are the gods and goddesses worshipped in ancient Egypt. The beliefs and rituals surrounding these gods formed the core of ancient Egyptian religion, which emerged sometime in prehistory. Deities represented natural forces and phenomena, and the Egyptians supported and appeased them through offerings and rituals so that these forces would continue to function according to "maat", or divine order. After the founding of the Egyptian state around 3100 BC, the authority to perform these tasks was controlled by the pharaoh, who claimed to be the gods' representative and managed the temples where the rituals were carried out.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The gods' complex characteristics were expressed in myths and in intricate relationships between deities: family ties, loose groups and hierarchies, and combinations of separate gods into one. Deities' diverse appearances in art—as animals, humans, objects, and combinations of different forms—also alluded, through symbolism, to their essential features.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: In different eras, various gods were said to hold the highest position in divine society, including the solar deity Ra, the mysterious god Amun, and the mother goddess Isis. The highest deity was usually credited with the creation of the world and often connected with the life-giving power of the sun. Some scholars have argued, based in part on Egyptian writings, that the Egyptians came to recognize a single divine power that lay behind all things and was present in all the other deities. Yet they never abandoned their original polytheistic view of the world, except possibly during the era of Atenism in the 14th century BC, when official religion focused exclusively on an abstract solar deity, the Aten.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Gods were assumed to be present throughout the world, capable of influencing natural events and the course of human lives. People interacted with them in temples and unofficial shrines, for personal reasons as well as for larger goals of state rites. Egyptians prayed for divine help, used rituals to compel deities to act, and called upon them for advice. Humans' relations with their gods were a fundamental part of Egyptian society.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The beings in ancient Egyptian tradition who might be labeled as deities are difficult to count. Egyptian texts list the names of many deities whose nature is unknown, and make vague, indirect references to other gods who are not even named. The Egyptologist James P. Allen estimates that more than 1,400 deities are named in Egyptian texts, whereas his colleague Christian Leitz says there are "thousands upon thousands" of gods.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The Egyptian language's terms for these beings were "nṯr", "god", and its feminine form "nṯrt", "goddess". Scholars have tried to discern the original nature of the gods by proposing etymologies for these words, but none of these suggestions has gained acceptance, and the terms' origin remains obscure. The hieroglyphs that were used as ideograms and determinatives in writing these words show some of the traits that the Egyptians connected with divinity. The most common of these signs is a flag flying from a pole. Similar objects were placed at the entrances of temples, representing the presence of a deity, throughout ancient Egyptian history. Other such hieroglyphs include a falcon, reminiscent of several early gods who were depicted as falcons, and a seated male or female deity. The feminine form could also be written with an egg as determinative, connecting goddesses with creation and birth, or with a cobra, reflecting the use of the cobra to depict many female deities.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The Egyptians distinguished "nṯrw", "gods", from "rmṯ", "people", but the meanings of the Egyptian and the English terms do not match perfectly. The term "nṯr" may have applied to any being that was in some way outside the sphere of everyday life. Deceased humans were called "nṯr" because they were considered to be like the gods, whereas the term was rarely applied to many of Egypt's lesser supernatural beings, which modern scholars often call "demons". Egyptian religious art also depicts places, objects, and concepts in human form. These personified ideas range from deities that were important in myth and ritual to obscure beings, only mentioned once or twice, that may be little more than metaphors.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Confronting these blurred distinctions between gods and other beings, scholars have proposed various definitions of a "deity". One widely accepted definition, suggested by Jan Assmann, says that a deity has a cult, is involved in some aspect of the universe, and is described in mythology or other forms of written tradition. According to a different definition, by Dimitri Meeks, "nṯr" applied to any being that was the focus of ritual. From this perspective, "gods" included the king, who was called a god after his coronation rites, and deceased souls, who entered the divine realm through funeral ceremonies. Likewise, the preeminence of the great gods was maintained by the ritual devotion that was performed for them across Egypt.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The first written evidence of deities in Egypt comes from the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3100–2686 BC). Deities must have emerged sometime in the preceding Predynastic Period (before 3100 BC) and grown out of prehistoric religious beliefs. Predynastic artwork depicts a variety of animal and human figures. Some of these images, such as stars and cattle, are reminiscent of important features of Egyptian religion in later times, but in most cases, there is not enough evidence to say whether the images are connected with deities. As Egyptian society grew more sophisticated, clearer signs of religious activity appeared. The earliest known temples appeared in the last centuries of the predynastic era, along with images that resemble the iconographies of known deities: the falcon that represents Horus and several other gods, the crossed arrows that stand for Neith, and the enigmatic "Set animal" that represents Set.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Many Egyptologists and anthropologists have suggested theories about how the gods developed in these early times. Gustave Jéquier, for instance, thought the Egyptians first revered primitive fetishes, then deities in animal form, and finally deities in human form, whereas Henri Frankfort argued that the gods must have been envisioned in human form from the beginning. Some of these theories are now regarded as too simplistic, and more current ones, such as Siegfried Morenz' hypothesis that deities emerged as humans began to distinguish themselves from and personify their environment, are difficult to prove.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Predynastic Egypt originally consisted of small, independent villages. Because many deities in later times were strongly tied to particular towns and regions, many scholars have suggested that the pantheon formed as disparate communities coalesced into larger states, spreading and intermingling the worship of the old local deities. Others have argued that the most important predynastic gods were, like other elements of Egyptian culture, present all across the country despite its political divisions.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The final step in the formation of Egyptian religion was the unification of Egypt, in which rulers from Upper Egypt made themselves pharaohs of the entire country. These sacred kings and their subordinates assumed the right to interact with the gods, and kingship became the unifying focus of the religion.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: New deities continued to emerge after this transformation. Some important deities such as Isis and Amun are not known to have appeared until the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC). Places and concepts could inspire the creation of a deity to represent them, and deities were sometimes created to serve as opposite-sex counterparts to established gods or goddesses. Kings were said to be divine, although only a few continued to be worshipped long after their deaths. Some non-royal humans were said to have the favor of the gods and were venerated accordingly. This veneration was usually short-lived, but the court architects Imhotep and Amenhotep son of Hapu were regarded as gods centuries after their lifetimes, as were some other officials.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Through contact with neighboring civilizations, the Egyptians also adopted foreign deities. Dedun, who is first mentioned in the Old Kingdom, may have come from Nubia, and Baal, Anat, and Astarte, among others, were adopted from Canaanite religion during the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC). In Greek and Roman times, from 332 BC to the early centuries AD, deities from across the Mediterranean world were revered in Egypt, but the native gods remained, and they often absorbed the cults of these newcomers into their own worship.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Modern knowledge of Egyptian beliefs about the gods is mostly drawn from religious writings produced by the nation's scribes and priests. These people were the elite of Egyptian society and were very distinct from the general populace, most of whom were illiterate. Little is known about how well this broader population knew or understood the sophisticated ideas that the elite developed. Commoners' perceptions of the divine may have differed from those of the priests. The populace may, for example, have treated the religion's symbolic statements about the gods and their actions as literal truth. But overall, what little is known about popular religious belief is consistent with the elite tradition. The two traditions form a largely cohesive vision of the gods and their nature.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Most Egyptian deities represent natural or social phenomena. The gods were generally said to be immanent in these phenomena—to be present within nature. The types of phenomena they represented include physical places and objects as well as abstract concepts and forces. The god Shu was the deification of all the world's air; the goddess Meretseger oversaw a limited region of the earth, the Theban Necropolis; and the god Sia personified the abstract notion of perception. Major gods were often involved in several types of phenomena. For instance, Khnum was the god of Elephantine Island in the midst of the Nile, the river that was essential to Egyptian civilization. He was credited with producing the annual Nile flood that fertilized the country's farmland. Perhaps as an outgrowth of this life-giving function, he was said to create all living things, fashioning their bodies on a potter's wheel. Gods could share the same role in nature; Ra, Atum, Khepri, Horus, and other deities acted as sun gods. Despite their diverse functions, most gods had an overarching role in common: maintaining "maat", the universal order that was a central principle of Egyptian religion and was itself personified as a goddess. Yet some deities represented disruption to "maat". Most prominently, Apep was the force of chaos, constantly threatening to annihilate the order of the universe, and Set was an ambivalent member of divine society who could both fight disorder and foment it.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Not all aspects of existence were seen as deities. Although many deities were connected with the Nile, no god personified it in the way that Ra personified the sun. Short-lived phenomena, such as rainbows or eclipses, were not represented by gods; neither were fire, water, or many other components of the world.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The roles of each deity were fluid, and each god could expand its nature to take on new characteristics. As a result, gods' roles are difficult to categorize or define. Despite this flexibility, the gods had limited abilities and spheres of influence. Not even the creator god could reach beyond the boundaries of the cosmos that he created, and even Isis, though she was said to be the cleverest of the gods, was not omniscient. Richard H. Wilkinson, however, argues that some texts from the late New Kingdom suggest that as beliefs about the god Amun evolved he was thought to approach omniscience and omnipresence, and to transcend the limits of the world in a way that other deities did not.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The deities with the most limited and specialized domains are often called "minor divinities" or "demons" in modern writing, although there is no firm definition for these terms. Some demons were guardians of particular places, especially in the Duat, the realm of the dead. Others wandered through the human world and the Duat, either as servants and messengers of the greater gods or as roving spirits that caused illness or other misfortunes among humans. Demons' position in the divine hierarchy was not fixed. The protective deities Bes and Taweret originally had minor, demon-like roles, but over time they came to be credited with great influence. The most feared beings in the Duat were regarded as both disgusting and dangerous to humans. Over the course of Egyptian history, they came to be regarded as fundamentally inferior members of divine society and to represent the opposite of the beneficial, life-giving major gods. Yet even the most revered deities could sometimes exact vengeance on humans or each other, displaying a demon-like side to their character and blurring the boundaries between demons and gods.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Divine behavior was believed to govern all of nature. Except for the few deities who disrupted the divine order, the gods' actions maintained "maat" and created and sustained all living things. They did this work using a force the Egyptians called "heka", a term usually translated as "magic". "Heka" was a fundamental power that the creator god used to form the world and the gods themselves.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The gods' actions in the present are described and praised in hymns and funerary texts. In contrast, mythology mainly concerns the gods' actions during a vaguely imagined past in which the gods were present on earth and interacted directly with humans. The events of this past time set the pattern for the events of the present. Periodic occurrences were tied to events in the mythic past; the succession of each new pharaoh, for instance, reenacted Horus's accession to the throne of his father Osiris.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Myths are metaphors for the gods' actions, which humans cannot fully understand. They contain seemingly contradictory ideas, each expressing a particular perspective on divine events. The contradictions in myth are part of the Egyptians' many-faceted approach to religious belief—what Henri Frankfort called a "multiplicity of approaches" to understanding the gods. In myth, the gods behave much like humans. They feel emotion; they can eat, drink, fight, weep, sicken, and die. Some have unique character traits. Set is aggressive and impulsive, and Thoth, patron of writing and knowledge, is prone to long-winded speeches. Yet overall, the gods are more like archetypes than well drawn characters. Different versions of a myth could portray different deities playing the same archetypal role, as in the myths of the Eye of Ra, a feminine aspect of the sun god who was represented by many goddesses. Deities' mythic behavior is inconsistent, and their thoughts and motivations are rarely stated. Most myths lack highly developed characters and plots, because their symbolic meaning was more important than elaborate storytelling.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The first divine act is the creation of the cosmos, described in several creation myths. They focus on different gods, each of which may act as creator deities. The eight gods of the Ogdoad, who represent the chaos that precedes creation, give birth to the sun god, who establishes order in the newly formed world; Ptah, who embodies thought and creativity, gives form to all things by envisioning and naming them; Atum produces all things as emanations of himself; and Amun, according to the theology promoted by his priesthood, preceded and created the other creator gods. These and other versions of the events of creation were not seen as contradictory. Each gives a different perspective on the complex process by which the organized universe and its many deities emerged from undifferentiated chaos. The period following creation, in which a series of gods rule as kings over the divine society, is the setting for most myths. The gods struggle against the forces of chaos and among each other before withdrawing from the human world and installing the historical kings of Egypt to rule in their place.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: A recurring theme in these myths is the effort of the gods to maintain "maat" against the forces of disorder. They fight vicious battles with the forces of chaos at the start of creation. Ra and Apep, battling each other each night, continue this struggle into the present. Another prominent theme is the gods' death and revival. The clearest instance where a god dies is the myth of Osiris's murder, in which that god is resurrected as ruler of the Duat. The sun god is also said to grow old during his daily journey across the sky, sink into the Duat at night, and emerge as a young child at dawn. In the process, he comes into contact with the rejuvenating water of Nun, the primordial chaos. Funerary texts that depict Ra's journey through the Duat also show the corpses of gods who are enlivened along with him. Instead of being changelessly immortal, the gods periodically died and were reborn by repeating the events of creation, thus renewing the whole world. Nonetheless, it was always possible for this cycle to be disrupted and for chaos to return. Some poorly understood Egyptian texts even suggest that this calamity is destined to happen—that the creator god will one day dissolve the order of the world, leaving only himself and Osiris amid the primordial chaos.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Gods were linked to specific regions of the universe. In Egyptian tradition, the world includes the earth, the sky, and the underworld. Surrounding them is the dark formlessness that existed before creation. The gods in general were said to dwell in the sky, although gods whose roles were linked with other parts of the universe were said to live in those places instead. Most events of mythology, set in a time before the gods' withdrawal from the human realm, take place in an earthly setting. The deities there sometimes interact with those in the sky. The underworld, in contrast, is treated as a remote and inaccessible place, and the gods who dwell there have difficulties in communicating with those in the world of the living. The space outside the cosmos is also said to be very distant. It too is inhabited by deities, some hostile and some beneficial to the other gods and their orderly world.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: In the time after myth, most gods were said to be either in the sky or invisibly present within the world. Temples were their main means of contact with humanity. Each day, it was believed, the gods moved from the divine realm to their temples, their homes in the human world. There they inhabited the cult images, the statues that depicted deities and allowed humans to interact with them in temple rituals. This movement between realms was sometimes described as a journey between the sky and the earth. As temples were the focal points of Egyptian cities, the god in a city's main temple was the patron deity for the city and the surrounding region. Deities' spheres of influence on earth centered on the towns and regions they presided over. Many gods had more than one cult center and their local ties changed over time. They could establish themselves in new cities, or their range of influence could contract. Therefore, a given deity's main cult center in historical times is not necessarily his or her place of origin. The political influence of a city could affect the importance of its patron deity. When kings from Thebes took control of the country at start of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC), they elevated Thebes' patron gods—first the war god Montu and then Amun—to national prominence.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: In Egyptian belief, names express the fundamental nature of the things to which they refer. In keeping with this belief, the names of deities often relate to their roles or origins. The name of the predatory goddess Sekhmet means "powerful one", the name of the mysterious god Amun means "hidden one", and the name of Nekhbet, who was worshipped in the city of Nekheb, means "she of Nekheb". Many other names have no certain meaning, even when the gods who bear them are closely tied to a single role. The names of the sky goddess Nut and the earth god Geb do not resemble the Egyptian terms for "sky" and "earth".


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The Egyptians also devised false etymologies giving more meanings to divine names. A passage in the Coffin Texts renders the name of the funerary god Sokar as "sk r", meaning "cleaning of the mouth", to link his name with his role in the Opening of the Mouth ritual, while one in the Pyramid Texts says the name is based on words shouted by Osiris in a moment of distress, connecting Sokar with the most important funerary deity.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The gods were believed to have many names. Among them were secret names that conveyed their true natures more profoundly than others. To know the true name of a deity was to have power over it. The importance of names is demonstrated by a myth in which Isis poisons the superior god Ra and refuses to cure him unless he reveals his secret name to her. Upon learning the name, she tells it to her son, Horus, and by learning it they gain greater knowledge and power.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: In addition to their names, gods were given epithets, like "possessor of splendor", "ruler of Abydos", or "lord of the sky", that describe some aspect of their roles or their worship. Because of the gods' multiple and overlapping roles, deities can have many epithets—with more important gods accumulating more titles—and the same epithet can apply to many deities. Some epithets eventually became separate deities, as with Werethekau, an epithet applied to several goddesses meaning "great enchantress", which came to be treated as an independent goddess. The host of divine names and titles expresses the gods' multifarious nature.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The Egyptians regarded the division between male and female as fundamental to all beings, including deities. Male gods tended to have a higher status than goddesses and were more closely connected with creation and with kingship, while goddesses were more often thought of as helping and providing for humans. Some deities were androgynous, but most examples are found in the context of creation myths, in which the androgynous deity represents the undifferentiated state that existed before the world was created. Atum was primarily male but had a feminine aspect within himself, who was sometimes seen as a goddess, known as Iusaaset or Nebethetepet. Creation began when Atum produced a sexually differentiated pair of deities: Shu and his consort Tefnut. Similarly, Neith, who was sometimes regarded as a creator goddess, was said to possess masculine traits but was mainly seen as female.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Sex and gender were closely tied to creation and thus rebirth. Male gods were believed to have the active role in conceiving children. Female deities were often relegated to a supporting role, stimulating their male consorts' virility and nurturing their children, although goddesses were given a larger role in procreation late in Egyptian history. Goddesses acted as mythological mothers and wives of kings and thus as prototypes of human queenship. Hathor, who was the mother or consort of Horus and the most important goddess for much of Egyptian history, exemplified this relationship between divinity and the king.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Female deities also had a violent aspect that could be seen either positively, as with the goddesses Wadjet and Nekhbet who protected the king, or negatively. The myth of the Eye of Ra contrasts feminine aggression with sexuality and nurturing, as the goddess rampages in the form of Sekhmet or another dangerous deity until the other gods appease her, at which point she becomes a benign goddess such as Hathor who, in some versions, then becomes the consort of a male god.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The Egyptian conception of sexuality was heavily focused on heterosexual reproduction, and homosexual acts were usually viewed with disapproval. Some texts nevertheless refer to homosexual behavior between male deities. In some cases, most notably when Set sexually assaulted Horus, these acts served to assert the dominance of the active partner and humiliate the submissive one. Other couplings between male deities could be viewed positively and even produce offspring, as in one text in which Khnum is born from the union of Ra and Shu.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Egyptian deities are connected in a complex and shifting array of relationships. A god's connections and interactions with other deities helped define its character. Thus Isis, as the mother and protector of Horus, was a great healer as well as the patroness of kings. Such relationships were in fact more important than myths in expressing Egyptians' religious worldview, although they were also the base material from which myths were formed.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Family relationships are a common type of connection between gods. Deities often form male and female pairs. Families of three deities, with a father, mother, and child, represent the creation of new life and the succession of the father by the child, a pattern that connects divine families with royal succession. Osiris, Isis, and Horus formed the quintessential family of this type. The pattern they set grew more widespread over time, so that many deities in local cult centers, like Ptah, Sekhmet, and their child Nefertum at Memphis and the Theban Triad at Thebes, were assembled into family triads. Genealogical connections like these vary according to the circumstances. Hathor could act as the mother, consort, or daughter of the sun god, and the child form of Horus acted as the third member of many local family triads.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Other divine groups were composed of deities with interrelated roles, or who together represented a region of the Egyptian mythological cosmos. There were sets of gods for the hours of the day and night and for each nome (province) of Egypt. Some of these groups contain a specific, symbolically important number of deities. Paired gods sometimes have similar roles, as do Isis and her sister Nephthys in their protection and support of Osiris. Other pairs stand for opposite but interrelated concepts that are part of a greater unity. Ra, who is dynamic and light-producing, and Osiris, who is static and shrouded in darkness, merge into a single god each night. Groups of three are linked with plurality in ancient Egyptian thought, and groups of four connote completeness. Rulers in the late New Kingdom promoted a particularly important group of three gods above all others: Amun, Ra, and Ptah. These deities stood for the plurality of all gods, as well as for their own cult centers (the major cities of Thebes, Heliopolis, and Memphis) and for many threefold sets of concepts in Egyptian religious thought. Sometimes Set, the patron god of the Nineteenth Dynasty kings and the embodiment of disorder within the world, was added to this group, which emphasized a single coherent vision of the pantheon.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Nine, the product of three and three, represents a multitude, so the Egyptians called several large groups "Enneads", or sets of nine, even if they had more than nine members. The most prominent ennead was the Ennead of Heliopolis, an extended family of deities descended from Atum, which incorporates many important gods. The term "ennead" was often extended to include all of Egypt's deities.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: This divine assemblage had a vague and changeable hierarchy. Gods with broad influence in the cosmos or who were mythologically older than others had higher positions in divine society. At the apex of this society was the king of the gods, who was usually identified with the creator deity. In different periods of Egyptian history, different gods were most frequently said to hold this exalted position. Horus was the most important god in the Early Dynastic Period, Ra rose to preeminence in the Old Kingdom, Amun was supreme in the New, and in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, Isis was the divine queen and creator goddess. Newly prominent gods tended to adopt characteristics from their predecessors. Isis absorbed the traits of many other goddesses during her rise, and when Amun became the ruler of the pantheon, he was conjoined with Ra to become a solar deity.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The gods were believed to manifest in many forms. The Egyptians had a complex conception of the human soul, consisting of several parts. The spirits of the gods were composed of many of these same elements. The "ba" was the component of the human or divine soul that affected the world around it. Any visible manifestation of a god's power could be called its "ba"; thus, the sun was called the "ba" of Ra. A depiction of a deity was considered a "ka", another component of its being, which acted as a vessel for that deity's "ba" to inhabit. The cult images of gods that were the focus of temple rituals, as well as the sacred animals that represented certain deities, were believed to house divine "ba"s in this way. Gods could be ascribed many "ba"s and "ka"s, which were sometimes given names representing different aspects of the god's nature. Everything in existence was said to be one of the "ka"s of Atum the creator god, who originally contained all things within himself, and one deity could be called the "ba" of another, meaning that the first god is a manifestation of the other's power. Divine body parts could act as separate deities, like the Eye of Ra and Hand of Atum, both of which were personified as goddesses. The gods were so full of life-giving power that even their bodily fluids could transform into other living things; humankind was said to have sprung from the creator god's tears, and the other deities from his sweat.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Nationally important deities gave rise to local manifestations, which sometimes absorbed the characteristics of older regional gods. Horus had many forms tied to particular places, including Horus of Nekhen, Horus of Buhen, and Horus of Edfu. Such local manifestations could be treated almost as separate beings. During the New Kingdom, one man was accused of stealing clothes by an oracle supposed to communicate messages from Amun of Pe-Khenty. He consulted two other local oracles of Amun hoping for a different judgment. Gods' manifestations also differed according to their roles. Horus could be a powerful sky god or vulnerable child, and these forms were sometimes counted as independent deities.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Gods were combined with each other as easily as they were divided. A god could be called the "ba" of another, or two or more deities could be joined into one god with a combined name and iconography. Local gods were linked with greater ones, and deities with similar functions were combined. Ra was connected with the local deity Sobek to form Sobek-Ra; with his fellow ruling god, Amun, to form Amun-Ra; with the solar form of Horus to form Ra-Horakhty; and with several solar deities as Horemakhet-Khepri-Ra-Atum. On rare occasion, deities of different sexes could be joined in this way, producing combinations such as Osiris-Neith. This linking of deities is called syncretism. Unlike other situations for which this term is used, the Egyptian practice was not meant to fuse competing belief systems, although foreign deities could be syncretized with native ones. Instead, syncretism acknowledged the overlap between deities' roles and extended the sphere of influence for each of them. Syncretic combinations were not permanent; a god who was involved in one combination continued to appear separately and to form new combinations with other deities. Closely connected deities did sometimes merge. Horus absorbed several falcon gods from various regions, such as Khenti-irty and Khenti-kheti, who became little more than local manifestations of him; Hathor subsumed a similar cow goddess, Bat; and an early funerary god, Khenti-Amentiu, was supplanted by Osiris and Anubis.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: In the reign of Akhenaten (c. 1353–1336 BC) in the mid-New Kingdom, a single solar deity, the Aten, became the sole focus of the state religion. Akhenaten ceased to fund the temples of other deities and erased gods' names and images on monuments, targeting Amun in particular. This new religious system, sometimes called Atenism, differed dramatically from the polytheistic worship of many gods in all other periods. The Aten had no mythology, and it was portrayed and described in more abstract terms than traditional deities. Whereas, in earlier times, newly important gods were integrated into existing religious beliefs, Atenism insisted on a single understanding of the divine that excluded the traditional multiplicity of perspectives. Yet Atenism may not have been full monotheism, which totally excludes belief in other deities. There is evidence suggesting that the general populace continued to worship other gods in private. The picture is further complicated by Atenism's apparent tolerance for some other deities, such as Maat, Shu, and Tefnut. For these reasons, the Egyptologists Dominic Montserrat and John Baines have suggested that Akhenaten may have been monolatrous, worshipping a single deity while acknowledging the existence of others. In any case, Atenism's aberrant theology did not take root among the Egyptian populace, and Akhenaten's successors returned to traditional beliefs.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Scholars have long debated whether traditional Egyptian religion ever asserted that the multiple gods were, on a deeper level, unified. Reasons for this debate include the practice of syncretism, which might suggest that all the separate gods could ultimately merge into one, and the tendency of Egyptian texts to credit a particular god with power that surpasses all other deities. Another point of contention is the appearance of the word "god" in wisdom literature, where the term does not refer to a specific deity or group of deities. In the early 20th century, for instance, E. A. Wallis Budge believed that Egyptian commoners were polytheistic, but knowledge of the true monotheistic nature of the religion was reserved for the elite, who wrote the wisdom literature. His contemporary James Henry Breasted thought Egyptian religion was instead pantheistic, with the power of the sun god present in all other gods, while Hermann Junker argued that Egyptian civilization had been originally monotheistic and became polytheistic in the course of its history.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: In 1971, Erik Hornung published a study rebutting such views. He points out that in any given period many deities, even minor ones, were described as superior to all others. He also argues that the unspecified "god" in the wisdom texts is a generic term for whichever deity is relevant to the reader in the situation at hand. Although the combinations, manifestations, and iconographies of each god were constantly shifting, they were always restricted to a finite number of forms, never becoming fully interchangeable in a monotheistic or pantheistic way. Henotheism, Hornung says, describes Egyptian religion better than other labels. An Egyptian could worship any deity at a particular time and credit it with supreme power in that moment, without denying the other gods or merging them all with the god that he or she focused on. Hornung concludes that the gods were fully unified only in myth, at the time before creation, after which the multitude of deities emerged from a uniform nonexistence.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Hornung's arguments have greatly influenced other scholars of Egyptian religion, but some still believe that at times the gods were more unified than he allows. Jan Assmann maintains that the notion of a single deity developed slowly through the New Kingdom, beginning with a focus on Amun-Ra as the all-important sun god. In his view, Atenism was an extreme outgrowth of this trend. It equated the single deity with the sun and dismissed all other gods. Then, in the backlash against Atenism, priestly theologians described the universal god in a different way, one that coexisted with traditional polytheism. The one god was believed to transcend the world and all the other deities, while at the same time, the multiple gods were aspects of the one. According to Assmann, this one god was especially equated with Amun, the dominant god in the late New Kingdom, whereas for the rest of Egyptian history the universal deity could be identified with many other gods. James P. Allen says that coexisting notions of one god and many gods would fit well with the "multiplicity of approaches" in Egyptian thought, as well as with the henotheistic practice of ordinary worshippers. He says that the Egyptians may have recognized the unity of the divine by "identifying their uniform notion of 'god' with a particular god, depending on the particular situation."


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Egyptian writings describe the gods' bodies in detail. They are made of precious materials; their flesh is gold, their bones are silver, and their hair is lapis lazuli. They give off a scent that the Egyptians likened to the incense used in rituals. Some texts give precise descriptions of particular deities, including their height and eye color. Yet these characteristics are not fixed; in myths, gods change their appearances to suit their own purposes. Egyptian texts often refer to deities' true, underlying forms as "mysterious". The Egyptians' visual representations of their gods are therefore not literal. They symbolize specific aspects of each deity's character, functioning much like the ideograms in hieroglyphic writing. For this reason, the funerary god Anubis is commonly shown in Egyptian art as a dog or jackal, a creature whose scavenging habits threaten the preservation of buried mummies, in an effort to counter this threat and employ it for protection. His black coloring alludes to the color of mummified flesh and to the fertile black soil that Egyptians saw as a symbol of resurrection.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Most deities were depicted in several ways. Hathor could be a cow, cobra, lioness, or a woman with bovine horns or ears. By depicting a given god in different ways, the Egyptians expressed different aspects of its essential nature. The gods are depicted in a finite number of these symbolic forms, so they can often be distinguished from one another by their iconographies. These forms include men and women (anthropomorphism), animals (zoomorphism), and, more rarely, inanimate objects. Combinations of forms, such as deities with human bodies and animal heads, are common. New forms and increasingly complex combinations arose in the course of history, with the most surreal forms often found among the demons of the underworld. Some gods can only be distinguished from others if they are labeled in writing, as with Isis and Hathor. Because of the close connection between these goddesses, they could both wear the cow-horn headdress that was originally Hathor's alone.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Certain features of divine images are more useful than others in determining a god's identity. The head of a given divine image is particularly significant. In a hybrid image, the head represents the original form of the being depicted, so that, as the Egyptologist Henry Fischer put it, "a lion-headed goddess is a lion-goddess in human form, while a royal sphinx, conversely, is a man who has assumed the form of a lion." Divine headdresses, which range from the same types of crowns used by human kings to large hieroglyphs worn on gods' heads, are another important indicator. In contrast, the objects held in gods' hands tend to be generic. Male deities hold "was" staffs, goddesses hold stalks of papyrus, and both sexes carry "ankh" signs, representing the Egyptian word for "life", to symbolize their life-giving power.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The forms in which the gods are shown, although diverse, are limited in many ways. Many creatures that are widespread in Egypt were never used in divine iconography. Others could represent many deities, often because these deities had major characteristics in common. Bulls and rams were associated with virility, cows and falcons with the sky, hippopotami with maternal protection, felines with the sun god, and serpents with both danger and renewal. Animals that were absent from Egypt in the early stages of its history were not used as divine images. For instance, the horse, which was only introduced in the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1650–1550 BC), never represented a god. Similarly, the clothes worn by anthropomorphic deities in most periods changed little from the styles used in the Old Kingdom: a kilt, false beard, and often a shirt for male gods and a long, tight-fitting dress for goddesses.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The basic anthropomorphic form varies. Child gods are depicted nude, as are some adult gods when their procreative powers are emphasized. Certain male deities are given heavy bellies and breasts, signifying either androgyny or prosperity and abundance. Whereas most male gods have red skin and most goddesses are yellow—the same colors used to depict Egyptian men and women—some are given unusual, symbolic skin colors. Thus, the blue skin and paunchy figure of the god Hapi alludes to the Nile flood he represents and the nourishing fertility it brought. A few deities, such as Osiris, Ptah, and Min, have a "mummiform" appearance, with their limbs tightly swathed in cloth. Although these gods resemble mummies, the earliest examples predate the cloth-wrapped style of mummification, and this form may instead hark back to the earliest, limbless depictions of deities.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Some inanimate objects that represent deities are drawn from nature, such as trees or the disk-like emblems for the sun and the moon. Some objects associated with a specific god, like the crossed bows representing Neith () or the emblem of Min () symbolized the cults of those deities in Predynastic times. In many of these cases, the nature of the original object is mysterious. In the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Periods, gods were often represented by divine standards: poles topped by emblems of deities, including both animal forms and inanimate objects.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: In official writings, pharaohs are said to be divine, and they are constantly depicted in the company of the deities of the pantheon. Each pharaoh and his predecessors were considered the successors of the gods who had ruled Egypt in mythic prehistory. Living kings were equated with Horus and called the "son" of many male deities, particularly Osiris and Ra; deceased kings were equated with these elder gods. Kings' wives and mothers were likened to many goddesses. The few women who made themselves pharaohs, such as Hatshepsut, connected themselves with these same goddesses while adopting much of the masculine imagery of kingship. Pharaohs had their own mortuary temples where rituals were performed for them during their lives and after their deaths. But few pharaohs were worshipped as gods long after their lifetimes, and non-official texts portray kings in a human light. For these reasons, scholars disagree about how genuinely most Egyptians believed the king to be a god. He may only have been considered divine when he was performing ceremonies.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: However much it was believed, the king's divine status was the rationale for his role as Egypt's representative to the gods, as he formed a link between the divine and human realms. The Egyptians believed the gods needed temples to dwell in, as well as the periodic performance of rituals and presentation of offerings to nourish them. These things were provided by the cults that the king oversaw, with their priests and laborers. Yet, according to royal ideology, temple-building was exclusively the pharaoh's work, as were the rituals that priests usually performed in his stead. These acts were a part of the king's fundamental role: maintaining "maat". The king and the nation he represented provided the gods with "maat" so they could continue to perform their functions, which maintained "maat" in the cosmos so humans could continue to live.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Although the Egyptians believed their gods to be present in the world around them, contact between the human and divine realms was mostly limited to specific circumstances. In literature, gods may appear to humans in a physical form, but in real life, the Egyptians were limited to more indirect means of communication.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The "ba" of a god was said to periodically leave the divine realm to dwell in the images of that god. By inhabiting these images, the gods left their concealed state and took on a physical form. To the Egyptians, a place or object that was "ḏsr"—"sacred"—was isolated and ritually pure, and thus fit for a god to inhabit. Temple statues and reliefs, as well as particular sacred animals, like the Apis bull, served as divine intermediaries in this way. Dreams and trances provided a very different venue for interaction. In these states, it was believed, people could come close to the gods and sometimes receive messages from them. Finally, according to Egyptian afterlife beliefs, human souls pass into the divine realm after death. The Egyptians therefore believed that in death they would exist on the same level as the gods and understand their mysterious nature.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Temples, where the state rituals were carried out, were filled with images of the gods. The most important temple image was the cult statue in the inner sanctuary. These statues were usually less than life-size and made of the same precious materials that were said to form the gods' bodies. Many temples had several sanctuaries, each with a cult statue representing one of the gods in a group such as a family triad. The city's primary god was envisioned as its lord, employing many of the residents as servants in the divine household that the temple represented. The gods residing in the temples of Egypt collectively represented the entire pantheon. But many deities—including some important gods as well as those that were minor or hostile—were never given temples of their own, although some were represented in the temples of other gods.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: To insulate the sacred power in the sanctuary from the impurities of the outside world, the Egyptians enclosed temple sanctuaries and greatly restricted access to them. People other than kings and high priests were thus denied contact with cult statues. The exception was during festival processions, when the statue was carried out of the temple enclosed in a portable shrine, which usually hid it from public view. People did have less direct means of interaction. The more public parts of temples often incorporated small places for prayer, from doorways to freestanding chapels near the back of the temple building. Communities also built and managed small chapels for their own use, and some families had shrines inside their homes.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Egyptian gods were involved in human lives as well as in the overarching order of nature. This divine influence applied mainly to Egypt, as foreign peoples were traditionally believed to be outside the divine order. In the New Kingdom, when other nations were under Egyptian control, foreigners were said to be under the sun god's benign rule in the same way that Egyptians were.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Thoth, as the overseer of time, was said to allot fixed lifespans to both humans and gods. Other gods were also said to govern the length of human lives, including Meskhenet and Renenutet, both of whom presided over birth, and Shai, the personification of fate. Thus, the time and manner of death was the main meaning of the Egyptian concept of fate, although to some extent these deities governed other events in life as well. Several texts refer to gods influencing or inspiring human decisions, working through a person's "heart"—the seat of emotion and intellect in Egyptian belief. Deities were also believed to give commands, instructing the king in the governance of his realm and regulating the management of their temples. Egyptian texts rarely mention direct commands given to private persons, and these commands never evolved into a set of divinely enforced moral codes. Morality in ancient Egypt was based on the concept of "maat", which, when applied to human society, meant that everyone should live in an orderly way that did not interfere with the well-being of other people. Because deities were the upholders of "maat", morality was connected with them. For example, the gods judged humans' moral righteousness after death, and by the New Kingdom, a verdict of innocence in this judgement was believed to be necessary for admittance into the afterlife. In general, however, morality was based on practical ways to uphold "maat" in daily life, rather than on strict rules that the gods laid out.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Humans had free will to ignore divine guidance and the behavior required by "maat", but by doing so they could bring divine punishment upon themselves. A deity carried out this punishment using its "ba", the force that manifested the god's power in the human world. Natural disasters and human ailments were seen as the work of angry divine "ba"s. Conversely, the gods could cure righteous people of illness or even extend their lifespans. Both these types of intervention were eventually represented by deities: Shed, who emerged in the New Kingdom to represent divine rescue from harm, and Petbe, an apotropaic god from the late eras of Egyptian history who was believed to avenge wrongdoing.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Egyptian texts take different views on whether the gods are responsible when humans suffer unjustly. Misfortune was often seen as a product of "isfet", the cosmic disorder that was the opposite of "maat", and therefore the gods were not guilty of causing evil events. Some deities who were closely connected with "isfet", such as Set, could be blamed for disorder within the world without placing guilt on the other gods. Some writings do accuse the deities of causing human misery, while others give theodicies in the gods' defense. Beginning in the Middle Kingdom, several texts connected the issue of evil in the world with a myth in which the creator god fights a human rebellion against his rule and then withdraws from the earth. Because of this human misbehavior, the creator is distant from his creation, allowing suffering to exist. New Kingdom writings do not question the just nature of the gods as strongly as those of the Middle Kingdom. They emphasize humans' direct, personal relationships with deities and the gods' power to intervene in human events. People in this era put faith in specific gods who they hoped would help and protect them through their lives. As a result, upholding the ideals of "maat" grew less important than gaining the gods' favor as a way to guarantee a good life. Even the pharaohs were regarded as dependent on divine aid, and after the New Kingdom came to an end, government was increasingly influenced by oracles communicating the gods' will.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Official religious practices, which maintained "maat" for the benefit of all Egypt, were related to, but distinct from, the religious practices of ordinary people, who sought the gods' help for their personal problems. Official religion involved a variety of rituals, based in temples. Some rites were performed every day, whereas others were festivals, taking place at longer intervals and often limited to a particular temple or deity. The gods received their offerings in daily ceremonies, in which their statues were clothed, anointed, and presented with food as hymns were recited in their honor. These offerings, in addition to maintaining "maat" for the gods, celebrated deities' life-giving generosity and encouraged them to remain benevolent rather than vengeful.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Festivals often involved a ceremonial procession in which a cult image was carried out of the temple in a barque-shaped shrine. These processions served various purposes. In Roman times, when local deities of all kinds were believed to have power over the Nile inundation, processions in many communities carried temple images to the riverbanks so the gods could invoke a large and fruitful flood. Processions also traveled between temples, as when the image of Hathor from Dendera Temple visited her consort Horus at the Temple of Edfu. Rituals for a god were often based in that deity's mythology. Such rituals were meant to be repetitions of the events of the mythic past, renewing the beneficial effects of the original events. In the Khoiak festival in honor of Osiris, his death and resurrection were ritually reenacted at a time when crops were beginning to sprout. The returning greenery symbolized the renewal of the god's own life.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Personal interaction with the gods took many forms. People who wanted information or advice consulted oracles, run by temples, that were supposed to convey gods' answers to questions. Amulets and other images of protective deities were used to ward off the demons that might threaten human well-being or to impart the god's positive characteristics to the wearer. Private rituals invoked the gods' power to accomplish personal goals, from healing sickness to cursing enemies. These practices used "heka", the same force of magic that the gods used, which the creator was said to have given to humans so they could fend off misfortune. The performer of a private rite often took on the role of a god in a myth, or even threatened a deity, to involve the gods in accomplishing the goal. Such rituals coexisted with private offerings and prayers, and all three were accepted means of obtaining divine help.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Prayer and private offerings are generally called "personal piety": acts that reflect a close relationship between an individual and a god. Evidence of personal piety is scant before the New Kingdom. Votive offerings and personal names, many of which are theophoric, suggest that commoners felt some connection between themselves and their gods, but firm evidence of devotion to deities became visible only in the New Kingdom, reaching a peak late in that era. Scholars disagree about the meaning of this change—whether direct interaction with the gods was a new development or an outgrowth of older traditions. Egyptians now expressed their devotion through a new variety of activities in and around temples. They recorded their prayers and their thanks for divine help on stelae. They gave offerings of figurines that represented the gods they were praying to, or that symbolized the result they desired; thus, a relief image of Hathor and a statuette of a woman could both represent a prayer for fertility. Occasionally, a person took a particular god as a patron, dedicating his or her property or labor to the god's cult. These practices continued into the latest periods of Egyptian history. These later eras saw more religious innovations, including the practice of giving animal mummies as offerings to deities depicted in animal form, such as the cat mummies given to the feline goddess Bastet. Some of the major deities from myth and official religion were rarely invoked in popular worship, but many of the great state gods were important in popular tradition.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: The worship of some Egyptian gods spread to neighboring lands, especially to Canaan and Nubia during the New Kingdom, when those regions were under pharaonic control. In Canaan, the exported deities, including Hathor, Amun, and Set, were often syncretized with native gods, who in turn spread to Egypt. The Egyptian deities may not have had permanent temples in Canaan, and their importance there waned after Egypt lost control of the region. In contrast, many temples to the major Egyptian gods and deified pharaohs were built in Nubia. After the end of Egyptian rule there, the imported gods, particularly Amun and Isis, were syncretized with local deities and remained part of the religion of Nubia's independent Kingdom of Kush. These gods were incorporated into the Nubian ideology of kingship much as they were in Egypt, so that Amun was considered the divine father of the king and Isis and other goddesses were linked with the Nubian queen, the "kandake". Some deities reached farther. Taweret became a goddess in Minoan Crete, and Amun's oracle at Siwa Oasis was known to and consulted by people across the Mediterranean region.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Under the Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty and then Roman rule, Greeks and Romans introduced their own deities to Egypt. These newcomers equated the Egyptian gods with their own, as part of the Greco-Roman tradition of "interpretatio graeca". The worship of the native gods was not swallowed up by that of foreign ones. Instead, Greek and Roman gods were adopted as manifestations of Egyptian ones. Egyptian cults sometimes incorporated Greek language, philosophy, iconography, and even temple architecture. Meanwhile, the cults of several Egyptian deities—particularly Isis, Osiris, Anubis, the form of Horus named Harpocrates, and the fused Greco-Egyptian god Serapis—were adopted into Roman religion and spread across the Roman Empire. Roman emperors, like Ptolemaic kings before them, invoked Isis and Serapis to endorse their authority, inside and outside Egypt. In the empire's complex mix of religious traditions, Thoth was transmuted into the legendary esoteric teacher Hermes Trismegistus, and Isis, who was venerated from Britain to Mesopotamia, became the focus of a Greek-style mystery cult. Isis and Hermes Trismegistus were both prominent in the Western esoteric tradition that grew from the Roman religious world.


title: Ancient Egyptian deities

text: Temples and cults in Egypt itself declined as the Roman economy deteriorated in the third century AD, and beginning in the fourth century, Christians suppressed the veneration of Egyptian deities. The last formal cults, at Philae, died out in the fifth or sixth century. Most beliefs surrounding the gods themselves disappeared within a few hundred years, remaining in magical texts into the seventh and eighth centuries. In contrast, many of the practices involved in their worship, such as processions and oracles, were adapted to fit Christian ideology and persisted as part of the Coptic Church. Given the great changes and diverse influences in Egyptian culture since that time, scholars disagree about whether any modern Coptic practices are descended from those of pharaonic religion. But many festivals and other traditions of modern Egyptians, both Christian and Muslim, resemble the worship of their ancestors' gods.


title: Peter Nygård

text: Peter J. Nygård (born Pekka Juhani Nygård; born July 24, 1941) is a Finnish-Canadian fashion executive. In 1967, he founded Nygård International, a Winnipeg-based company that made women's apparel. In 2020, Nygård was accused of long-term sex trafficking, rape, and racketeering after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided his company's offices in New York City. Later that year, he was formally charged and was arrested on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, including allegations of sex trafficking involving minors. In October 2021, Nygård was charged by Toronto police with multiple counts of sexual assault and forcible confinement in incidents that occurred between the mid-1980s and mid-2000s; accusations of sexual misconduct by Nygård date as far back as 1968. As of September 2022, Nygård's criminal trials are ongoing and he has not been convicted of any crimes.


title: Peter Nygård

text: Peter Nygård was born Pekka Juhani Nygård in Helsinki, Finland, on July 24, 1941. His parents emigrated to Deloraine, Manitoba, Canada, in 1952, when Nygård was around eleven years old. In 1964, Nygård graduated from the University of North Dakota with a business degree.


title: Peter Nygård

text: Nygård established Nygård Apparel Manufacturing Company, later rebranded Nygård International, in Winnipeg in 1967. The company's Canadian headquarters were located on King Street in Toronto, Ontario, while its world headquarters were located in Times Square, New York, New York, United States. Times Square was also the location of Nygård's fashion concept retail store, which opened on Friday, November 6, 2009.


title: Peter Nygård

text: In February 2020, the headquarters of Nygård International was raided as part of a sex trafficking investigation against Nygård by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The company filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in New York on March 18, 2020, and a Manitoba judge ordered a group of Nygård companies into receivership the following day. On April 30, a Canadian judge authorized an accounting firm to sell off part of the business.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On November 24, 2019, Bahamian police began investigating six allegations of rape made against Nygård. All the alleged victims were under 16. On January 27, 2020, Nygård faced two separate lawsuits after being accused of sexual assault.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On February 13, 2020, 10 women filed a class-action lawsuit against Nygård in New York, alleging that he had raped them at his Bahamas residence. The alleged attacks took place between 2008 and 2015. The women also alleged that he maintained a sex-trafficking ring, and that seven of the women were under 18 when the attacks took place.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On February 14, 2020, it was reported that the Bahamian police were investigating the allegations made by four of the women in the class-action suit. On February 25, 2020, the New York headquarters of Nygård International were raided by the FBI and the New York City Police Department in connection with sex trafficking claims. After these, Nygård announced that he would step down from the company and divest his ownership interest. In March 2020, a judge said that there was no evidence Nygård had actually resigned, and that he still owned 100% of the shares of the Nygård group of companies.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On April 20, 2020, 36 new women joined the class-action suit, bringing the total number of plaintiffs in the sexual assault case to 46. On June 17, 2020, it was reported that 11 more women had joined the class-action lawsuit, bringing the total number of plaintiffs to 57. On July 9, 2020, Nygard filed a motion to dismiss the claims of 52 of the plaintiffs, stating that "numerous deficiencies" barred their claims, and in particular that the claims of 50 of the plaintiffs lacked any connection to New York. He also argued that the statute of limitations had expired for 38 of the plaintiffs.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On August 17, 2020, Nygård was sued by two of his sons on accusations of directing a known sex worker said to be "his girlfriend" to rape them. On August 22, 2020, it was reported that the class-action suit had been placed on hold, the US government having requested a stay of proceedings while the criminal investigation was ongoing.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On December 15, 2020, it was reported that Nygård had been arrested in Winnipeg for extradition to the US to face charges of sex trafficking by the US attorney's office in Manhattan. On February 5, 2021, Nygård was denied bail and faced extradition to the US.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On February 18, 2021, it was reported that a new lawsuit had been filed by one of the class-action plaintiffs, which named Peter Nygård's niece, Angela Dyborn, as an alleged co-conspirator in the alleged sex-trafficking scheme. On March 26, 2021, Nygård was denied bail for a second time. In April 2021 it was reported that Nygård would face an extradition hearing in November 2021.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On 1 October 2021, Peter Nygard agreed to be extradited to the US, to face the charges against him that were filed there. The same day Nygard was charged by Toronto police with six counts of sexual assault and three counts of forcible confinement.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On December 17, 2020, two days after Nygård's arrest, it was reported that Discovery+ was releasing a series about Peter Nygård's life entitled "Unseamly: The Investigation of Peter Nygård". The documentary aired in February 2021, and included interviews with family members and former Nygård employees.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On January 25, 2021, CBC Podcasts released the first episode of their podcast, "Evil by Design", about the allegations against Nygård. The podcast includes interviews with alleged victims. It was later adopted into a documentary series that appeared on CBC Gem. An episode of "Dateline" about the Nygard case also aired in December 2021.


title: Peter Nygård

text: In addition to his alleged sex trafficking ring, over the years Nygard has been accused numerous times of sexual abuse including rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.


title: Peter Nygård

text: Nygård has been involved in numerous lawsuits before his arrest in 2020, including suits involving alleged abusive labour practices, tax evasion, and conspiring to murder


title: Peter Nygård

text: In 2005, Nygård attempted to solve a parking overflow problem at Nygård Cay by installing a large concrete slab on Louis Bacon's property. Bacon sought and obtained a court injunction to remove it. In 2007, Bacon, annoyed by noise at Nygård's house, installed industrial-grade speakers at the edge of his property and pointed them at Nygård's house.


title: Peter Nygård

text: In the summer of 2010, Bacon's house was raided by Bahamian police, leading to the confiscation of the speakers. Bacon claimed it was the work of Nygård, a claim he denied. "Vanity Fair" reported that Nygård also used fake news sites to smear Bacon as running a drug-smuggling operation, as a member of the KKK, having been charged with insider trading, and being involved in murdering the Point House caretaker. In January 2015, Bacon filed a defamation lawsuit against Nygård over these claims. In January 2021, Savvy Media Holdings acquired the rights to a couple of books relating to Nygård's feud with Louis Bacon, to make a feature film. Justin Lader was chosen to write the film.


title: Peter Nygård

text: In 1984, he purchased a beach bungalow for $1.76 million. In 1987 Nygård built a compound at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. On April 14, 2010, Nygård announced he was planning a $50-million renovation of Nygård Cay, which would take two years to complete and repair the damage and employ 200 construction workers.


title: Peter Nygård

text: A letter from the Bahamian prime minister's office rejected his construction application, citing the improper expansion of his property through intentional accretion of land over the seabed. On September 28, 2018, Nygård Cay was seized by the Supreme Court of the Bahamas as part of a legal battle surrounding Nygård’s efforts to dredge the sea floor around the estate. In 2021 the property is in a general state of disrepair.


title: Peter Nygård

text: Nygård has ten children with eight women. Nygård has been a longtime sponsor of amateur sports in the Bahamas. In June 2010, he was the main sponsor of the Amateur Boxing Federation of the Bahamas team for Continental Elite Boxing Championships, an invitation-only event in Quito, Ecuador.


title: Peter Nygård

text: On December 15, 2020, Nygård was arrested in Winnipeg, Canada, under the . he was in jail awaiting extradition proceedings, and a potential extradition to the US.


title: Peter Nygård

text: In 2002, Deloraine, Manitoba where Nygård grew up, unveiled a commemorative plaque and named a park in his honour. In May 2020, the park’s name was changed to Prairie Sentinels Park, after Nygård was arrested under charges of sex trafficking and rape.


title: 401(k)

text: In the United States, a 401(k) plan is an employer-sponsored, defined-contribution, personal pension (savings) account, as defined in subsection 401(k) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Periodical employee contributions come directly out of their paychecks, and may be matched by the employer. This legal option is what makes 401(k) plans attractive to employees, and many employers offer this option to their (full-time) workers.


title: 401(k)

text: There are two types: traditional and Roth 401(k). For Roth accounts, contributions and withdrawals have no impact on income tax. For traditional accounts, contributions may be deducted from taxable income and withdrawals are added to taxable income. There are limits to contributions, rules governing withdrawals and possible penalties.


title: 401(k)

text: The benefit of the Roth account is from tax-free capital gains. The net benefit of the traditional account is the sum of (1) a possible bonus (or penalty) from withdrawals at tax rates lower (or higher) than at contribution, and (2) the impact on qualification for other income-tested programs from contributions and withdrawals reducing and adding to taxable income, minus the consequences of capital gains being taxed at regular income rates.


title: 401(k)

text: Before 1974, a few U.S. employers had been giving their staff the option of receiving cash in lieu of an employer-paid contribution to their tax-qualified retirement plan accounts. The U.S. Congress banned new plans of this type in 1974, pending further study. After that study was completed, Congress reauthorized such plans, provided they satisfied certain special requirements. Congress did this by enacting Internal Revenue Code Section 401(k) as part of the Revenue Act. This occurred on November 6, 1978.


title: 401(k)

text: The first implementation of the 401(k) plan was in 1978, about three weeks after Section 401(k) was enacted, before the Revenue Act of 1978 even went into effect. Ethan Lipsig, of the outside law firm for Hughes Aircraft Company, sent a letter to Hughes Aircraft outlining how it could convert its after-tax savings plan into a 401(k) plan.


title: 401(k)

text: Ted Benna was among the first to establish a 401(k) plan, creating it at his own employer, the Johnson Companies (today doing business as Johnson Kendall & Johnson). At the time, employees could contribute 25% of their salary, up to $30,000 per year, to their employer's 401(k) plan.


title: 401(k)

text: There are two main types corresponding to the same distinction in an Individual Retirement Account (IRA); variously referred to as traditional vs. Roth, or tax-deferred vs. tax exempt, or EET vs. TEE.


title: 401(k)

text: Income taxes on pre-tax contributions and investment earnings in the form of interest and dividends are tax deferred. The ability to defer income taxes to a period where one's tax rates may be lower is a potential benefit of the 401(k) plan. The ability to defer income taxes has no benefit when the participant is subject to the same tax rates in retirement as when the original contributions were made or interest and dividends earned. Earnings from investments in a 401(k) account in the form of capital gains are not subject to capital gains taxes. This ability to avoid this second level of tax is a primary benefit of the 401(k) plan. Relative to investing outside of 401(k) plans, more income tax is paid but less taxes are paid overall with the 401(k) due to the ability to avoid taxes on capital gains.