Meet 25 of the Ancient Egyptians’ Most Significant Gods and Goddesses, From the Falcon-Headed Horus to the Sky Deity Hathor

“Divine Egypt,” a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features nearly 250 artifacts representing the rich pantheon of Egyptian deities

Ella Feldman | Daily Correspondent

October 14, 2025

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This fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking visitors on a journey to ancient Egypt.

“Divine Egypt,” which runs through January 19, 2026, is the Manhattan museum’s first major exhibition of Egyptian art in over a decade. The show brings together nearly 250 artifacts—many on loan from internationally renowned cultural institutions—that reflect the deity worship that was so central to Egyptian society.

The exhibition “will immerse visitors in the breathtaking imagery of the most formidable ancient deities and expansive universe of the Egyptian gods,” says Max Hollein, the museum’s director, in a statement.

Over thousands of years, the Egyptians built a polytheistic culture centered around gods and goddesses like Anubis, Horus and Isis. At the ancient civilization’s peak, scholars believe, the Egyptians worshipped upwards of 1,500 deities that took on both human and animal forms. Twenty-five of them are featured in “Divine Egypt,” which exhibits objects as large as towering statues and as small as delicate figurines. Some of those artifacts are on display for the first time ever.

Organized by Egyptian art curator Diana Craig Patch and research associate Brendan Hainline, “Divine Egypt” unfolds as a succession of small sections, each devoted to a god. The effect, writes the New York Times’ Holland Cotter, is that visitors are introduced to the gods “one by one, in their offices—chapels?—where they reveal themselves fully, as personalities, with the quirks, contradictions and surprises that implies.”

Some of these contradictions emerge from the many ways in which a single god or goddess can be represented. A section about Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of love, joy and motherhood, displays such variations on a theme. In a piece of a column on display, Hathor is seen with a human face—and cow ears. In a statue, “she’s turned totally bovine, with almond-shape[d] eyes formed from rock crystal,” writes ARTNews’ Alex Greenberger. And within a small pendant, she is seen transforming into Bat, a different cow goddess entirely.

Such overlapping depictions and transformations were standard in ancient Egyptian polytheism, says Patch in the statement.

“The identity of an ancient Egyptian god may at first seem easy to recognize, but looks can be deceiving, as one form can be shared by many deities,” she explains. “Across more than 3,000 years of history, gods, attributes, roles and myths were rarely dropped from use, yet the Egyptians of the time had no difficulty understanding and accepting the resulting multiplicity.”

“Divine Egypt” features loans from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Louvre in Paris; and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, among other cultural institutions. More than 140 items are from the Met’s own collection of ancient Egyptian art. Beyond sculptures, visitors will see a pectoral (a form of jewelry popular in ancient Egypt) made of lapis and gold, substances said to represent the skin and hair of Egyptian deities, respectively, as well as a recreation of a barque, a divine boat used by the gods, which was paraded during festivals to bring worshippers closer to their deities.

The Met has long attracted visitors with its dazzling Egyptian artifacts, seen both in its permanent collection and in blockbuster exhibitions like the 1978 display of objects from King Tutankhamun’s tomb, a then-unprecedented success for the museum that drew more than 1.3 million people. Though artifacts from ancient Egypt date back millennia, their enduring appeal suggests they still have something novel to offer contemporary crowds.

“The ways in which the ancient Egyptian gods were depicted are vastly different from the divine beings in contemporary religions and therefore are intriguing to modern audiences,” Patch says in the statement.

Something else sets “Divine Egypt” apart from the many exhibitions on ancient Egypt that have come before it, too. While shows like the Tut display or the Met’s 2013 “Cleopatra’s Needle” emphasized the importance of pharaohs and queens, Egyptian royalty takes the backseat in the Met’s latest offering, which places the focus on celestial beings.

“It’s not the kind of monumental power-art display—Dendur-ish, pharaoh-intensive—that gatherings of this material tend to be,” Cotter writes for the New York Times. “The emphasis here is less on political might than on spiritual intimacy.”

“Divine Egypt” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through January 19, 2026.

Ella Feldman | Read More

Ella Feldman is a journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in NPR, Washington City Paper, DCist and more.