Near a leading center of petroleum production in Egypt on the Red Sea, the push to clean energy bears the name of Amunet, a primordial Egyptian goddess of wind and air. Reuters reported that Egypt sealed a $1.1 billion solar and wind deal, which includes the construction of the Amunet wind farm. It’s expected to get commissioned in 2023 and will be a 500MW onshore wind power project.
According to AMEA power, the wind power project could avoid 28,223,000t CO₂ over the project’s life, the “largest of its kind in Africa.” Construction plans considered its impact on flora and fauna, including birds like the Egyptian vulture and falcons and found minimal impact at the arid desert location.
Egypt hosted UN climate talks last year and made many deals to “green its energy,” including another project on the Red Sea. For example, further north, there will be a major green hydrogen plant using renewable energy. There are also enormous plans for greening the desert by diverting the water from the Nile, the largest river in the world.
Soon, there will be a vast area of wind turbines as the planet attempts to confront climate change.
Video by The Primest:
As shared before, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass has said that climate change threatens preserving the country’s ancient heritage. Reliefs carved thousands of years ago are fading.
“I sincerely believe that [the main threat to the conservation of Egyptian heritage] is climate change,” he said.
Hawass noted he had seen reliefs fading at the Temple of Kom Ombo, constructed during the Ptolemaic dynasty, 180–47 BC, like the ones below.
Who is Amunet?
In a previous article, we explored mysterious tattoos on the mummy of a famous priestess Amunet. She was a Priestess of Hathor, found northwest of Luxor or ancient Thebes. Her mummy dates to the Middle Kingdom (c.2134-1991 BC), long before the Ptolemaic period.
But there is also a little-known goddess Amunet, worshipped at Thebes into the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Her story is fascinating for many reasons, but one is that she predates time and creation in the Hermopolitan model of creation and is mentioned in the earliest known religious texts, the Pyramid Texts.
Amunet and The Beginning of Creation
Amunet and Amun (or Amen) were one pair among eight primordial Ogdoad deities who were creator gods who came from one Supreme Being. Both were invisible, “hidden ones,” associated with the unseen, thus alluding to the wind.
However, since they existed before Earth, they existed before the wind. Like the others in this creation story, they can be viewed as cosmic laws of nature, not necessarily literal gods.
Instead, they may have been ways to represent sophisticated (and impossible to draw) concepts, the “secret powers of creation,” the introduction of duality and the source of earthly consciousness, Atum Ra, or Khepri. This deity emerged from a cosmic egg in Nun, the primeval “ocean.”
Amun and Amunet were dual aspects out of one, and Amunet was known as “Mother Who is Father,” an androgynous description predating gender. Thus, there was no “gender” as such until creation on Earth. But all of creation contains the powers of creation, life force of both aspects. This life force goes by many names worldwide, such as Sekhem, Kundalini (coiling like a snake), Prana, Chi, the force in popular culture. But contained in all of nature are both aspects, male and female.
It’s amazing that people may have arrived at such profound enduring concepts of cosmogenesis thousands of years ago. If you think of it scientifically and philosophically, it’s delving into the Big Question of consciousness and creation.
“Representing the unseen nature of the chaos-void that existed before the Earth, Amunet and her primordial partner, Amun were the only two primeval gods who rose to their own prominence throughout several dynastic periods,” wrote anthropologist Alexandria Frye.
Frye notes that texts from Hermopolis regarded Amunet as the “sole attendant of the great cosmic egg from which Ra was born.”
Interestingly, a hieroglyph of the cosmic egg is the same for an embryo in a woman’s womb. Similarly, Priestess Amunet had tattoos associated with protecting the unborn.
Primordial Deities
Like other deities, the Ogdoad were depicted symbolically with animal heads. But, the males in the Ogdoad could transform into one bull, and the females transform into one cow. Like the other female deities in the Ogdoad, Amunet sometimes has a snake head, thought to be all females in ancient Egypt.
Meanwhile, males have amphibious frog heads, symbols of fertility regardless of gender. These depictions seem to be a means to describe formless abstract concepts describing something reminiscent of a scientific concept much like the primordial soup.
Some myths also say that Amnuet is the source of the tree from which all life emerged, just like the Tree of Life. There is also a similar Egyptian creation story of the Ennead, which I’ve attempted to explain in a simple way below.
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Video about Amunet by SA Reader:
The video below explores women in ancient Egypt, where the equality of the sexes was unlike in surrounding areas.
Video by Grunge: