Ash (deity)

Ash or Yuc (Tamazight: ⵢⵓⵛ, romanized: Yuc, IPA: [jʊʃ]) was an Amazigh sky god worshipped by the Libyan and Tehenu tribes of the Western Desert, an area of desert that lies west of the Nile River.

[4] In particular, he was identified by the ancient Egyptians as the god of the vineyards of the western Nile Delta[4] and thus was viewed as a benign deity.

The first known reference to Ash dates to the Protodynastic Period, and he continued to be mentioned as late as the 26th Dynasty.

Ash was usually depicted as a human,[4] whose head was one of the desert creatures, variously being shown as a lion, vulture, hawk,[4] snake, or the unidentified Set animal.

In an article in the journal Ancient Egypt (in 1923), and again in an appendix to her book, The Splendor that was Egypt, Margaret Murray expands on such depictions, and draws a parallel to a Scythian deity, who is referenced in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia universalis.