Egyptian cosmology

The Egyptian cosmology was mostly mythological, and partially inspired by the Assyro-Babylonian cosmology, partially determined by the natural processes which were experienced by the ancient Egyptians, some of them being specific to their country, as the yearly cycles of Nile, some of them being universal for any human observer, as the motion in the sky of the sun and of the planets. Since the ancient Egyptians were polytheists and they deified the celestial bodies, it was extremely important for them to compute accurately the moments of emergence of their gods and goddesses. This was one of the most significant causes of the development of astronomy and of cosmogonic myths by the Egyptian civilization. The movement on the sky of the brightest stars was useful for navigation on the seas, while the astronomical objects of our own solar system played a religious and cosmological function.

A logical consequence of the immortality of the immanent central gods of the Egyptian pantheon was the eternity of the Universe. The bodies of the gods composed the physical world. The gods were immortal, hence the world was also eternal. On the other hand, the multi-layered structure of reality, influenced by the Babylonian mythology, depicted the world, with its earths and heavens, as being spatially finite. Still, the Universe before its creation was a spatially infinite chaos, that meaning that only the places inhabited by humans, spirits of the deceased and gods were spatially finite. The god of creation, Atum or Ra, was the ontological and cosmological result of an imbalance between the primordial pairs of deities, which composed so-called Ogdoad. The first god himself, Atum, was a creation of Nu, the initial void, and hence any comparison with Christian cosmogonic myths would be meaningless. Nu was the deification of the primordial watery abyss. The ancient Egyptians envisaged the oceanic abyss of Nu as surrounding a bubble in which the sphere of life is encapsulated. Nu is the source of all that appears in a differentiated world, encompassing all aspects of divine and earthly existence. Of course, a modern scientist can draw a parallel between the emergence of a new creative personified power from the primordial disequilibrium, Atum, and the hypothesized quantum level imbalances of the Planck era, when the matter existed under the form of strings generated by the primordial black holes of the super-string theory. The strings constituted the seeds for the structure formation that took place after the inflation.

The primeval waters may be compared with the spacetime foam of the Planck era, while the ripples formed on the ancestral waters may be paralleled with the strings from super-string theory or with thermal fluctuations from the inflationary cosmologies. The male gods which composed the primary Ogdoad were represented as frogs, while the female deities were represented as snakes. The Egyptian cosmogonies varied by city within the ancient kingdom of Khem, and, consequently, the myths slightly differed one to another in places like Hermopolis, Heliopolis, Memphis, Thebes. If somebody will really want to make a comparison between Egyptian mythological cosmologies and modern quantum physics, he or she would need to associate the snake-shaped goddesses with the waves, and the frog-shaped gods with the particles. But I think that this would be too much even for a time when cosmologies are more literary than the science fiction books.

Atum, the god of creation, conceived the pair of deities Shu, the god of air or atmosphere, and Tefnut, the goddess of humidity or water:

'Shu is the atmosphere, his creation produced a dry, empty space in the midst of the universal ocean, within which all life exist '(Allen, P. James - Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hyerogliphs, p. 176, Cambridge University Press, 2010). 

An analogy between the water-surrounded Earth and the bubble Universes of the inflationary theory is not hard to be realized, although would be quite unlikely to sustain that Egyptians made scientific assumptions about the beginning of the world. And since the newly established Universe needed material items where they did not existed before, Shu and Tefnut gave birth to further deities:

 'These are Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky. [...] Together they define the physical structure and the limits of the created world.' (Ibidem, p. 176.). 

The descendants of Geb and Nut are the primary forces of life: Osiris and Isis, Seth and Nephtys. The process of creation is completed with the birth of sun, Horus, the offspring of Osiris and Isis.

Though the Egyptian cosmology appeals to mythological names and trivial metaphors for explaining creation, as many commentators noticed, the Egyptian myths of genesis are not as far from reality as is the solar disc far from earth:

'Although is explained in generational terms, the Heliopolitan view of the creation is therefore less a step-by-step account than a kind of Egyptian Big Bang, in which all creation happened at once, in the moment when Atum evolved in the world, and time itself began.' (Ibidem - pp. 177-178.).

Bibliography:

James, Allen, P. - Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hyerogliphs, Cambridge University Press, 2010.