Nun was the Egyptian personification of the primordial watery abyss from which creation emerged.
In Egyptian creation traditions, Nun was not an ordinary river or sea deity. It represented the limitless, undifferentiated waters that existed before the ordered world. From those waters emerged the first mound of land, often called the benben, and the creator or sun god arose. Different Egyptian theological centers told this emergence in different ways, sometimes involving Atum, Ra, a lotus, or another form of the newborn sun.
Nun belonged to the Ogdoad, an eight-deity group representing primordial conditions. His female counterpart was Naunet. The pair expressed the watery dimension of the pre-creation cosmos, alongside other paired concepts such as darkness, hiddenness, and endlessness.
The name is also rendered Nu and is associated with ideas of watery depth or inertness. Nun was not generally worshipped through a major independent cult. Egyptian religious thought could also imagine the cosmos eventually dissolving back into Nun, making the abyss both the beginning of existence and its possible final destination.