The Greco-Roman phoenix has for ancestor the benu , sacred bird of the Sun formerly attested in Egypt. Over the centuries, its presence multiplied and its symbolism grew richer, in relation to the scales of time, cosmic and divine, astronomical and human, solar and funerary . Hypostasis and soul of the supreme divinity, this eternal being is found at the origins, as the first creature to emerge from the primordial waters on the land surface of Heliopolis, then alongside the different forms of the god master of time here below and in the au beyond: Atum, Re, then Osiris, dead and resurrected. It is a figure of the daily and annual cycles of the sun, to which are attached the power of the pharaoh, renewed in jubilee festivals, and the flooding of the Nile which punctuates the calendar of the country and marks the beginning of the New Year. - [Author]

Language: French