Khepri was the morning aspect of the sun-god, the rising sun, the dawn that ascends from the eastern horizon to begin the daily journey. He was depicted as a scarab beetle — sometimes alone, sometimes pushing the solar disk before him as the dung-beetle pushes its ball of dung — or as a man with a scarab for a head. The image was an act of theological observation: the Egyptians had noticed that the dung-beetle rolls its ball backwards across the ground, that within the ball the female lays her eggs, and that from the ball, in due time, new beetles emerge as if by spontaneous generation. The image of the scarab pushing its ball thus suggested both the daily rolling of the sun across the sky and the principle of self-generation, of life arising from itself; and the scarab became one of the most ubiquitous of all Egyptian sacred images. The name kheper signified both the beetle and the verb "to come into being" — and both were aspects of the same creative principle.

Khepri had no narrative myths of his own; he was rather an aspect of Ra, the morning aspect, paired with the noon aspect (Ra) and the evening aspect (Atum) to make the threefold sun. But his image — as scarab amulet, scarab seal, scarab stamp — was perhaps the single most common religious object in Egypt. Heart scarabs, carved from green stone and inscribed on their underside with a spell from the Book of the Dead (Spell 30B, addressed to the heart of the dead, instructing it not to bear false witness against its owner), were placed inside the wrappings of every mummy of any means; and small faience scarabs were worn by the living as ordinary amulets, exchanged as gifts, set into rings, and circulated in such numbers that they survive today by the hundreds of thousands.