“I am the Bennu, the soul of Ra, and the guide of the gods in the Duat. I go in like the Hawk, and I come forth like the Bennu, the Morning Star”.

The Bennu was a sacred bird identified with the Phoenix and which represented the Ba of the sun god Ra, of which it was the symbol; in fact, in the Late Period the hieroglyphic picturing the Bennu represented the sun-god.

In the myth of the creation it was the first life form appearing on the primordial hill which rose from the water chaos.

He was pictured as the Heron alighting on the emerging rocks after the floods of the Nile, and his return would announce a new time of wealth and fertility.

In funerary texts the dead person was sometimes compared with the Bennu, considered a manifestation of the resurrected Osiris. The Heliopolitan legend says that the bird was born from the flames of a sacred tree, and that its sing was so sublime that god Ra used to stop his boat to listen to it.