Faience head of the god Horus

Horus is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities, worshipped from almost the late prehistoric period in Egypt until the Ptolemaic Kingdom and the Roman conquest. Horus, being a god of the sky, war and hunting, was most often depicted as a falcon, most likely a lanner falcon or a peregrine falcon, though representations of him as a man with a falcon head are equally frequent. The Pyramid Texts, a collection of ancient Egyptian religious texts from the time of the Old Kingdom, dated between 2400 and 2300 BC, describe the nature of the pharaoh as both Horus and Osiris with the pharaoh in life being Horus and becoming Osiris in death, where he was united with the rest of the gods. New incarnations of Horus succeeded the deceased pharaoh on earth in the form of new pharaohs. The god has been recorded under very different forms and these are often treated as distinct gods by Egyptologists, although these various forms could possibly be different perceptions of the same multi-layered deity in which certain attributes or syncretic relationships are emphasized, not necessarily in opposition but complementary to one another. – (OF.108)