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The phoenix (also rarely spelled phenix) is a mythical bird, sacred in ancient Egypt. Said to live for 500 or for 1461 years, the phoenix is a solitary male bird with beautiful gold and red plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix would arise. The new phoenix will embalm the ashes of the old phoenix in an egg made of myrrh and deposit it in Heliopolis ("the city of the sun" in Greek), located in Egypt.
The phoenix also appears in the mythologies of other cultures; although descriptions (and life-span) vary, the phoenix became popular in early Christian art and literature as a symbol of the resurrection, of immortality, and of life-after-death.
The phoenix had associations with the sun and with sun-gods, such as EgyptianEgyptian mythology (or Egyptian religion is the name for the succession of beliefs held by the people of Egypt until the coming of Christianity and Islam. The timespan involved is nearly three thousand years, and beliefs varied considerably over time, so RaThis article is about the Egyptian god. In Polynesian mythology (specifically: Society Islands), Ra is an alternate spelling for Roua. Ra is also a character from the film Stargate. See RA for uses of the two-letter combination RA . D10The Eye of Ra also and the GreekGreek mythology comprises the collected legends of Greek gods and goddesses and ancient heroes and heroines, originally created and spread within an oral-poetic tradition. Our surviving sources of mythology are either transcriptions of this spoken word, o Apollo.
The GreeksSee The Greeks for the financial term for the set of measures derived from the Black-Scholes option pricing formula, named for the use of the Greek alphabet to denote parameters. Greeks in Ancient History In Latin literature, Graeci (or Greeks in English) claimed the phoenix lived in ArabiaArabia is a peninsula in Southwest Asia at the junction of Africa and Asia. It lies north of Ethiopia and northern Somalia; south of Israel, the disputed Palestinian territories, and Jordan; and southwest of Iran. The coastal limits of Arabia comprise: on next to a well. At dawn, it bathed in the water of the well and the sun-god (Apollo) stopped his chariot (the sun) in order to listen.
In ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare born April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564; died April 23, 1616 ( O. May 3, 1616 ( N. has a reputation as the greatest writer the English language has ever known. Indeed, the English Renaissance has often been called "the age of Shakespe's play The Tempest, this myth is famously referred to:
The Egyptians described it as being similar to a heron, but the Greeks and Romans likened it to a peacock or to an eagle.
The word "Phoenix" sometimes appears spelled "Phoinix". It is etymologically similar to the word " firebird".