Ancient Egyptian name of the scarab-headed god of the rising sun, meaning 'he who is coming into being.'
Khepri is one of the great names of ancient Egyptian theology, belonging to the deity who embodied the rising sun — the miraculous daily moment when light returns to the world. The name derives from the Egyptian verb 'kheper,' meaning 'to come into being,' 'to transform,' or 'to become,' and Khepri was venerated as the god of creation, transformation, and regeneration. He was typically depicted as a man with a scarab beetle for a head, or simply as the scarab itself — an image drawn from the beetle's habit of rolling dung balls, which the Egyptians saw as a metaphor for the sun being pushed across the sky.
In the Egyptian cosmological imagination, the sun had three aspects across the day: Khepri at dawn (becoming), Ra at noon (being), and Atum at dusk (completing). Khepri was therefore the most generative and hopeful of these manifestations — the moment of emergence, the first light over the horizon. Scarab amulets bearing Khepri's image were among the most commonly produced religious objects in ancient Egypt, worn as protective talismans and placed with the dead to ensure resurrection.
The heart scarab, substituted for the human heart during mummification, was among the most sacred objects in Egyptian burial practice. As a given name in the modern world, Khepri carries extraordinary depth — it is simultaneously one of the oldest recorded names on earth and one that feels genuinely unusual in contemporary naming registers. Parents drawn to Khepri are often reaching for something that transcends trend, a name that connects a child to one of humanity's oldest civilizations and its most beautiful cosmological ideas: that each day is a resurrection, and every life a becoming.