Amani, the Nubian form of Amun, is the great god of the older Nubian religion that underlies the modern river cult, adopted from Egypt but so deeply naturalized that his ram-headed image merged with indigenous Nubian rams of water and fertility. As the royal god he chose and confirmed the kings through his oracle at Napata, and as lord of the water-lands he was tied to the life-giving Nile. His public cult lapsed with the coming of Christianity and Islam, and he is not himself an object of present-day Nubian devotion; he is recalled here as the ancient substratum over which the later saint and Nile cults were laid. Popular Nubian writing plays on the resonance between his name and the Nobiin word aman, 'water,' though this echo is a folk association rather than a demonstrated etymology.