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39 lour divine couples who followed him. The first divine couple to tule when Ra tired of staying in Egypt were his own children, the male Shu ("Dryness") and the female Tefnut ("Moisture"): their main task, according to Egyptian talcs, was to help Ra control the skies over the Earth. Shu and Tefnut set the example for mortal Pharaohs in later times: the king selected his own half-sister as his royal spouse. They were followed on the divine throne—as both legends and Manetho inform us—by their children, again a brother-sister cou- ple: Geb ("Who Piles Up the Earth") and Nut ("The Stretched-out Firmament"). The purely mythological approach to the Egyptian tales of the gods—that of primitive people watching Nature and seeing "gods" in its phenomena—has led scholars to assume that Geb represented the Earth deified, and Nut the Heavens: and that by calling Geb and Nut Father and Mother of the gods who thereafter reigned over Egypt, the Egyptians believed that the gods were born of the union of Earth and Heaven. But if the legends and verses in the Pyramid Texts and The Book of the Dead are to be taken more iterally, it appears that Geb and Nut were so named on account of activities related to the periodic appearance of the Bennu bird, from which the Greeks obtained the legend of the Phoe- nix: an eagle whose feathers were red and gold, which died and reappeared at intervals lasting several millennia. It was for that bird—whose name was the same as that of the contraption in which Ra landed on Earth—that Geb engaged in great earth- works and Nut "stretched out the firmament of the sky." These eats, it appears, were carried out by the gods in the "Land of the Lions"; it was there that Geb "hath opened up the earth" or the great spherical object that came from the "stretched-out skies" and appeared on the horizon. In the aftermath of the above-described feats, Geb and Nut turned over the direct rule of Egypt to their four children: Asar (The All-Seeing"), whom the Greeks called Osiris, and his sister- wife Ast, better known as Isis; and Seth and his wife Nephtys (Nebt-Hat, "Lady of the House"), the sister of Isis. It was with these gods, who were truly gods of Egypt, that the Egyptian tales most concerned themselves; but in depicting them (Fig. 9) Seth was never shown without his animal disguise: his face was never seen, and the meaning of his name still defies Egyptologists, even if it is identical to the name given in the Bible to Adam and Eve's Anne third son. The Contending of Horus and Seth