Bennu

English edit

Bennu as depicted in 1895, E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead

Asteroid Bennu photographed by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2018

Borrowing from Egyptian bnw. Doublet of phoenix.

Bennu

(Egyptian mythology, often with "the") A self-created deity with the form of a bird (in New Kingdom artwork, a heron) that features in the ancient Egyptian creation myth and is also described as the ba (soul) of Ra.
- 1830, "E. H.", Fragments on Egyptian Literature, Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Arts, Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, page 349,
  One compound name, of which it is an element, is that of the city, from which the Sebennytic mouth of the Nile was denominated Sebennu, that is, "the temple of Bennu," a god, who was represented in the form of a waterfowl, and whose phonetic name is of frequent occurrence.
- 2014, J. Daniel Gunther, The Angel & The Abyss, Nicolas-Hays, Inc. (Ibis Press), page 113,
  15 The Uas Sceptre is the origin of the “Phoenix Wand”, which is the Wand of the Imperator of $\mathrm {A} \!\therefore \!\mathrm {A} \!\therefore \,$ . The head of the wand was not originally a Bennu Bird, but the head of the god Set. The identification with the Bennu seems to have originated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
(astronomy) The near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu.
- 2018 December 3, Kenneth Chang, “NASA’s Osiris-Rex Arrives at Asteroid Bennu After a Two-Year Journey”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:
  Osiris-Rex’s arrival at Bennu was not like the landing of NASA’s InSight spacecraft in one piece on the surface of Mars last Monday. (Happily, it landed flawlessly.)

The bird is sometimes identified as the phoenix.
- Classical thinking linked the phoenix of Greek mythology to an Egyptian mythological origin; this idea was reinforced by the 19th century discovery that the Bennu had been venerated in Heliopolis. Modern scholars, however, consider the Egyptian sources problematic and are sceptical about the direction of the influence.