Discover

'Dedun' (or 'Dedwen') was a Nubian god worshipped since at least 2400BC. There is much uncertainty about his original nature, especially since he was depicted as a lion, but the earliest known information indicates that he had become a god of incense. Since incense was, at this point in history, an extremely expensive luxury commodity, and Nubia was the source of much of it, he was quite an important god. The wealth that the trade in incense delivered to Nubia lead to him being the god of prosperity, and wealth in particular.
However, he is said to have been associated with a fire that threatened to destroy the other gods, leading many Nubiologists to consider that there may have been a great fire, at a shared complex of temples, to different gods, that started in a temple of Dedun, though there are no candidate events known for this.
Although mentioned, as being a Nubian god, in the pyramid texts, there is no evidence that he was worshipped anywhere north of Aswan. Nethertheless, in the Middle Kingdom, during the Egyptian rule over Kush, as god of incense, and so associated with funerary rites, Dedun was said, by the Egyptians, to be protector of deceased (Nubian) rulers.