He was the god of the lands south of Egypt, of Nubia and Kush; and though Egyptian in his cult-form, he was acknowledged to be of southern origin. The Pyramid Texts already speak of Dedun as 'the youth of the south who came forth from Nubia,' and he is associated throughout the historical period with the products of those southern lands — gold, ivory, ebony, and above all incense, the costly resin without which no temple could maintain its daily offerings.

He was depicted most often as a man with a slender lithe figure, sometimes lion-headed, sometimes wholly human in form, wearing the kilt and the conventional regalia of an Egyptian god. His role was to bring up the wealth of the south to the temples of the north; he was honored at the great fortresses of Lower Nubia — Buhen, Mirgissa, Semna — where the Egyptian governors of the New Kingdom kept up his cult, and at the great Nubian capital of Kerma in earlier times he had been honored under what the Egyptians took to be his proper name.

His character is somewhat ambiguous in the Egyptian record. He is unambiguously a god of the southern lands, and his cult was honored most actively when Egypt held those lands; yet he is invoked by Egyptian kings as a god of their own pantheon, and his image is carved in their southern temples in the same conventions as those of Horus or Amun. He represents, in his single figure, the long Egyptian engagement with Nubia, in which conquest and honor and exchange were always commingled.