The Beast of Set, the Unknown Creature at the Heart of Ancient Egypt

The Egyptian pantheon of gods is among the most familiar to the modern world. Although perhaps not as well known as the gods of Hinduism, or the ancient Greek pantheon and their knock-off Roman copies, most will know about at least a few of these figures.

Names like Isis and Osiris, Horus and Ra will be recognizable to most. Perhaps the most interesting feature of these gods is that many of them have animal heads, if not outright animal forms. 

The earliest versions of the mythology had a surprising number with the heads of frogs, but as the religion of Egypt matured and developed over centuries, things settled into their more familiar aspects.

We have Horus, he of the perfect eyesight, with the head of a hawk. We have Sobek, the crocodile headed god of the Nile, and Taweret the hippo. Khepri the scarab beetle pushes the morning sun across the sky, and Anubis the jackal protects the dead as they pass to the afterlife.

• The Michigan Relics, and the Greatest Fraud in American History
• Chavin de Huantar: Do You Want To Meet a God?

Sobek is a fertility god, which makes perfect sense given how much the peoples of Egypt depended on the Nile to survive. Khepri is another example, pushing the sun much like a dung beetle pushing a ball of dung.

But there is one god who is less easy to explain. Not because we do not understand his role in Egyptian religion, but for an entirely different reason: we do not recognize what animal this god is associated with.

The god, Set, is the god of chaos, violence and disorder. And whatever his animal totem is, we have yet to find it.

Ancient Cryptid of the Desert

To understand Set is to fundamentally understand how ancient Egypt saw their world. They lived in a desert land, entirely unable to sustain human life but for the Nile along which they lived, and the annual miracle of the Nile flooding.

For them this divided the world into two, each offering a stark contrast to the other. There was the black land, the fertile soils irrigated by the Nile, where life thrived. And there was the endless red land, the desert which surrounded them, which meant only death.

The animals of the Egyptian pantheon come from the black land, as would be expected: this is what the people knew. The jackal of Anubis, herald of the afterlife, lurked on the edges as would be expected, but hippos, crocodiles, ibis, these are all animals of the Nile.

Set however was the lord of the red land. He had no place in the land of the living, and his animal therefore would be one of the desert, rarely seen. Even with our modern knowledge we do not know what animal this is.

It superficially resembles a dog, but there are strange features. The nose droops like an anteater’s and the ears appear spade shaped, often wider at the top than at the base and abruptly cut off. The tail of the Set animal (also known as the sha) is unusual too, stiffly straight and with a fork or a bulb at the end like a lion’s.

Most modern Egyptologists dismiss this animal as something fictional, a fantasy beast created to represent the unknown. But as an explanation this falls short on several fronts.

Firstly, although there were other fictional creatures in the Egyptian pantheon, the strong tendency is for the animal totems of the gods to be real. Egyptian religion is grounded in the world in which they lived and for them to invent an animal to represent part of it is highly inconsistent.

The idea of a fictional Set animal might also point to a certain lack of imagination. The desert which surrounded Egypt was overwhelming in its threat, it was everywhere, it was endless, it was deadly. What is the animal out there that looks like that?

This leaves the possibility that the Set animal is a creature the Egyptians associated with the desert, one which (unlike the other gods) did not come from the Nile but from the wasteland beyond. Plenty of candidates have been advanced, but all ignore some aspect of the sha as it is consistently, almost insistently, depicted.

It could be a donkey with a strange nose and ears. It could be an aardvark with an inexplicably stiff tail, or an antelope without horns,

It could be a jackal, albeit one which looks nothing like the Anubis jackal, or a dog of some kind, perhaps a Saluki, although why any of these would be chosen is also a mystery. None of these offer a satisfactory match to the Set animal as depicted.

Nor are there similar creatures in other mythologies which would allow us to identify this beast. The Greeks referred to the Set animal as a “Typhonic hound” but this is due to its resemblance to their own fantasy creature: they didn’t understand the sha, any more than we do.

One other possibility remains. Could this animal be something known to the Egyptians but unknown to us, perhaps a creature of the desert which has since died out. It seems impossible that this unknown creature could exist out there still, but this is certainly what some believe.

The hieroglyphs depicting Set became more and more abstracted as the Egyptian language developed, making identification of the creature based on its appearance even more difficult. We must return to the earliest depictions to see the sha as the Egyptians did, and this leaves us with nothing but questions.

Was there a desert creature, a large dog of some kind, which lived on the fringes of Egyptian life and represented the chaos and death of life away from the all-sustaining Nile? Was there something that the Egyptians saw in the desert which they associated with these dangers?

And why can we find no trace of it now?

Top Image: The Beast of Set resembles an aardvark, but also a dog, a lion, a jackal and yet has features of none of these. What could it be? Source: A. Parrot / Public Domain.