B A Hokam wrote;

>"Repeating cycles and/or events require an explanation, as do all natural
> events that occur on earth."

Human nature rejects the randomness of life. How does a drought be explained as a fluke of weather when 2 of your 4 children can not survive to the next harvest now?

Since no one "of us" can control such events, and human nature rebels against chaos law, it must be others. The “others” can be spirits of the river, winds, weather, sun, moon, mountain, harvest, earth, etc.
But first and foremost they must BE.
How long after the human imagination created such spirits did the first people set themselves up as intermediaries? Years? Days?

The religion we understand as the AE polytheism began well before the invention of records, and grew as an accretion of these various spirits into entities that controlled every aspect of life.
This evolution continued throughout Egyptian history so understanding the place of a deity in the 4th dynasty in no way means the deity has the same perceived powers or "pride of place" in the 19th.

Take 80+ evolving and mutating deities and track them over 2 millennia?
That's not a job, that's a career BA.

Jammer