Khepri is associated with the dung beetle (kheper), whose behavior of maintaining spherical balls of dung represents the forces which move the sun in Ancient Egyptian folklore...
Khepri gradually came to be considered as an embodiment of the sun itself, and therefore was a solar deity.
To explain where the sun goes at night, such pushing was extended to the underworld, Khepri's pushing of the sun being ceaseless...
The subsequent hatching of the eggs from this seemingly unpromising material lead to the Egyptians associating the scarab with renewal, rebirth and resurrection.
The scarab's habit of rolling up dung into spheres and pushing it across the ground was also noted by the Ancient Egyptians.
Khepri was often associated with the Sun and was conceived as a gigantic scarab rolling the Sun before him across the sky.
The renewal and rebirth associated with the scarab also came into play here.
Khepri renewed the Sun each day before rolling it above the horizon and carried it safely through the other world after sunset to renew it the next day.
Khepri was variously represented as a scarab, a man with the face of a scarab and a man whose head was surmounted by a scarab...
Khepri was soon seen as an aspect of the sun itself, in particular the sun at day break - when it "emerged" from the underworld.
He was closely associated with Atum, Nefertum (literally "young Atum" or "beautiful Atum") and Ra (who absorbed many of Atum's attributes).
Khepri was the emerging sun, Nefertum was the new born sun, Ra was the sun during the day, and Atum was the setting sun.
in later funerary texts, Atum and Khepri merged into a ram-headed beetle who was the ultimate expression of the power of life over death.
He is first mentioned in the Pyramid Texts but may well have been well known for some time before that because crude scarabs have been recovered which date from the Neolithic period (7000-5000 BC). Khepri´s popularity was at its height during the New Kingdom....
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