Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly?
Left to right: Horus, Anubis, Thoth, and Set
Turns out no one knows for sure. The Greeks called it the “Typhonic beast”, while modern Egyptologists call it the “Set animal”, but either way it’s still a mystery.
Let’s get some context. Ancient Egyptian gods aren’t depicted in the exact same way every time. Part of this is because “Ancient Egypt” covers a period of thousands of years across a broad geographic region. Famously, the length of time between the Pyramids and Cleopatra’s reign is longer than between Cleopatra’s reign and today. Anubis, for example, was portrayed as a black canine in the Early Dynastic Period (around 3000 BCE), and as a man with a black jackal head in the Middle Kingdom (around 2000 BCE). Other gods entered or exited popular worship over time, and some gods were combined or split.
Additionally, the gods as described in surviving myths would often take different physical forms. As a result, many gods see different depictions as humans, animals, and hybrids. Artistically, the head represents the god’s original form and the body the form that god is assuming, so Horus’s hybrid form is a falcon god taking a human form, while a sphinx is a human pharaoh taking an animal form.
Set and Horus tying together Egypt
Set himself had multiple roles. He represented disorder in an ordered world. He was a rival to Horus, representing the desert “red land” in contrast to Horus’s fertile “black land” of the Nile valley.
The Greeks definitely viewed Set as an evil god, but the Egyptian perspective was more complex. On the one hand, various versions of the “Osiris myth” have Set murdering his brother Osiris and fighting his nephew Horus for the throne. On the other hand, Set protected the sun god Ra every night by standing at the prow of Ra’s barge to slay the serpent Apep (or “Apophis” as the Greeks would later call him), constantly saving everyone from eternal darkness. Sounds as much like a chaotic neutral god as I’ve ever heard of.
Like other gods, Set can be either an animal or an animal-human hybrid. But that brings us back to the main question: what animal? The Set animal is usually depicted as having angular ears that stick up from its head, a stiff tail, and a long nose with a downward curve. That doesn’t obviously describe any animal, but modern scholars have a few candidates.
One leading option is a hunting dog, like the modern Saluki breed. This would match the Set animal’s slender form and long tail. The squared ears could be an artistic rendering of “cropped” ears, a cosmetic surgery where a dog’s ears are cut and propped up vertically. Cropping was long believed to reduce the risk of injury to dogs in combat, and was commonly performed on hunting or fighting dogs. It’s still seen on some dogs today, though many view it as cruel.
But the Saluki isn’t the only possibility. Other kinds of canines have been suggested, as have pigs, camels, and more exotic animals from Giraffes to Aardvarks, which the Egyptians could plausibly have encountered on their trading trips farther south into Africa. During the Late Period (around 500 BCE), Set is depicted with the head of a donkey, perhaps indicating that donkeys inspired the Set animal originally.
Others have suggested that the Set animal might be extinct, though we haven’t found one among the many mummified animals we’ve uncovered from the period, either. And given Set’s nature as a god of chaos, it might not even be a real animal at all.
One reason this is so hard to answer comes from ancient history itself. Egypt was conquered several times by foreign nations that the Egyptians perceived as worshiping Set. This led to Set being cast as a villain, and several older depictions of Set and his animal were literally chiseled away.
So we may not know for sure what the Set animal is, but it’s certainly teaching us a lot about one of the world’s oldest civilizations and how they worshiped. And maybe that’s exactly how a god of chaos within an ordered world would want it to be.
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