Deity · Egyptian · c. 2600 BCE
Geb
Also called Seb, Keb (per Wikidata)
The earth as a male god lying on his back — an inversion of the usual arrangement, since in Egypt the sky is female and the ground is not.
Well sourced
Most mythologies pair a sky father with an earth mother. Egypt does the opposite: Nut arches overhead as the sky and Geb lies below as the ground, and their separation by Shu is the founding act that makes a habitable world. It is worth registering how unusual that is. The Greek Ouranos and Gaia, the Vedic Dyaus and Prithvi, and the Norse arrangement all run the other way. Whatever produced the Egyptian inversion, it was not a universal human instinct about sky and soil.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
No independent cult of note; invoked within the Heliopolitan Ennead rather than worshipped apart from it.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Pyramid Texts · c. 2350–2100 BCE
- Rank
- The Earth
- Pantheon
- Egyptian
- Order
- Egyptian pantheon
- Base of operations
- No independent cult of note; invoked within the Heliopolitan Ennead rather than worshipped apart from it.
- Era
- c. 2600 BCE
- Traditions
- Egyptian
- Placed in
- The Heliopolitan Ennead
Traits
- Domain
- The earth, earthquakes, the dead held in the ground
- Traditional form
- A man lying beneath the arch of Nut, sometimes green, sometimes with vegetation growing from him
2 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 2 offices attributed to Geb, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- material1
- transformation1
material
transformation
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Geb, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 800 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Geb, Seb
The earth as the court that settles the quarrel: the king's claim is put before Geb, who divides the land between Horus and Set. The Egyptian earth god is a magistrate before he is a landscape, and that is his oldest recorded function.
The earth itself; his laughter is the earthquake, and the dead are held in him.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Geb?
What rank is Geb?
How else is Geb spelled?
What is Geb said to do?
How old is Geb?
Nearest in the corpus
If Geb is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Khepri
The Morning Sun · Egyptian
The sun at dawn, in the form of a scarab beetle rolling it up over the horizon — one of the three daily aspects of the sun, and a pun on the word for coming into being.
Anubis
Guide of the Dead · Egyptian
Embalmer and psychopomp, who leads the dead to the scales — the office Western tradition eventually gives to Michael and to Azrael.
Horus
Falcon King · Egyptian
Son of Osiris, who contends eighty years with Set for the throne. Every living pharaoh was understood to be his incarnation.
Isis
Great of Magic · Egyptian
The great magician who reassembles Osiris and tricks Ra into surrendering his secret name. Her cult eventually reached as far as Roman Britain.
Nephthys
Lady of the House · Egyptian
Set's wife who sides with her sister Isis against him, and mourns Osiris at the head of the bier.
Osiris
Lord of the Dead · Egyptian
Murdered by Set, reassembled by Isis, and installed as judge of the dead. He is the earliest fully developed dying-and-rising sovereign we have.
The books behind Geb
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Pyramid Texts
Anonymous; carved for the kings and queens of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties · c. 2350–2100 BCE · Old Egyptian
Read The Pyramid Texts in full ↗The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Anonymous; tr. E. A. Wallis Budge · c. 1550 BCE onward · Egyptian
Read The Egyptian Book of the Dead in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Hunefer · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.