The Egyptian Book of the dead by P. Le Page Renouf and Edouard Naville

1. The Bennu is a bird of the Heron kind. He is very commonly but, I

think, erroneously identified with the Phoenix. The bird described by Herodotus, II, 73, was in outline and size “very like an eagle,” which no one could say of the Bennu. He appeared only once in five hundred years, whereas the Bennu appeared every day. The fable as told by the Greeks is utterly unsupported by any Egyptian authority known to us.