page_title: Nymphaea lotus
section_title: The white lotus in Ancient Egypt
hierarchical_section_title: Nymphaea lotus / Uses / The white lotus in Ancient Egypt
caption_attribution_description: Painting from the reign of Akhenaten (circa 1352-1336 B.C.) depicting lotus buds and flowers. Originally from the "Women's Quarters of the North Palace" at el Amarna excavated in 1926-27. Now in the Brooklyn Museum, catalog number 27.35.
context_page_description: Nymphaea lotus, the white Egyptian lotus, tiger lotus, white lotus or Egyptian white water-lily, is a flowering plant of the family Nymphaeaceae.
context_section_description: The ancient Egyptians cultivated the white lotus in ponds and marshes.
  This flower often appears in ancient Egyptian decorations. They believed that the lotus flower gave them strength and power; remains of the flower have been found in the burial tomb of Ramesses II. Egyptian tomb paintings from around 1500 BC provide some of the earliest physical evidence of ornamental horticulture and landscape design; they depict lotus ponds surrounded by symmetrical rows of acacias and palms. In Egyptian mythology Horus was occasionally shown in art as a naked boy with a finger in his mouth sitting on a lotus with his mother. The lotus was one of the two earliest Egyptian capitals motifs, the topmost members of a column. At that time, the motifs of importance are those based on the lotus and papyrus plants respectively, and these, with the palm tree capital, were the chief types employed by the Egyptians, until under the Ptolemies in the 3rd to 1st centuries BC, various other river plants were also employed, and the conventional lotus capital went through various modifications. Women often wore amulets during childbirth, which depicted Heqet as a frog, sitting in a lotus.
  
  The number 1,000 in ancient Egyptian numerals is represented by the symbol of the white lotus. The related hieroglyph is: 
  The ancient Egyptians also extracted perfume from this flower. They also used the white lotus in funerary garlands, temple offerings and female adornment.
  The white lotus is a candidate for the plant eaten by the Lotophagi of Homer's Odyssey.
caption: White lotus decorations. Frieze at a palace in Amarna (1352-1336 BC)
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