Numbers in Egyptian mythology

Three: symbol of plurality

• The beer used to trick Sekhmet soaked three hands into the ground.
• The second god, Re, named three times to define the sun: dawn, noon, and evening.
• Thoth is described as the “thrice-great god of wisdom”.
• A doomed prince was doomed to three fates: to die by a crocodile, a serpent, or a dog.
• Three groups of three attempts each were required for a legendary peasant to recover his stolen goods.
• A boasting mage claimed to be able to cast a great darkness to last three days.
• After asking Thoth for help, a King of Ethiopia was brought to Thebes and publicly beaten three further times.
• An Ethiopian mage tried—and failed—three times to defeat the greatest mage of Egypt.
• An Egyptian mage, in an attempt to enter the land of the dead, threw a certain powder on a fire three times.
• There are twelve sections of the Egyptian land of the dead. The dead disembark at the third.
• The Knot of Isis, representing life, has three loops.

  Five

• The second god, Rê, named five gods and goddesses.
• Thoth added five days to the year by winning the light from the moon in a game of gambling.
• It took five days for the five children of Nut and Geb to be born. These are Osiris, Nephthys, Isis, Set and Haroeris - not be mistaken with Harpocrates, who defeated Set in battle.
• A boasting mage claimed to be able to bring the Pharaoh of Egypt to Ethiopia and by magic, have him beaten with a rod five hundred times, and return him to Egypt in the space of five hours.
• An Ethiopian mage comes to challenge Egypt's greatest mage—to reading of a sealed letter—five hundred years after the atrocity depicted in it occurred.
• The star, or pentagram, representing the afterlife, has five points.

Seven: symbol of perfection, effectiveness, completeness

• Seven thousand barrels of red beer were used to trick Sekhmet out of killing.
• In her search for her husband's pieces, the goddess Isis was guarded by seven scorpions.
• A legendary famine lasted seven years.
• The lowest amount that the Nile flooded to solve the famine was seven cubits. The highest was 28 cubits.
• A doomed prince found a tower seventy cubits high with seventy windows.
• Set tore the god Osiris’ body into fourteen pieces: seven each for the two regions of Upper and Lower Egypt.
• The Pool symbol, representing water, contains seven zigzag lines.
• The Gold symbol has seven spines on its underside.