The mystery animal on an ancient god's head

if you right click and open the images in new tabs you'll be able to see them because the unfortunate blue background will be gone. in B4 "i don't see that in reader mode" the Set animal has a snout that is more bird/reptile-like. the ears are a cipher.

There is no conclusion in this article if you care about such things.

• ludamn · 10 hours ago

  Yeah, I'm a fan of Egyptian mythology and enjoyed reading it, for one moment I thought the article would present some new evidence/findings to settle the debate, unfortunately that's not the case NGL, the quote below was a nice way to end the article giving all the data we have though > So we may not know for sure what the Set animal is, [...] And maybe that’s exactly how a god of chaos within an ordered world would want it to be.

• fooker · 9 hours ago

  The great thing about history is that there can only be conjectures, never conclusions. Unless you invent a time machine of course.

  • yipinwong · 9 hours ago

    i meant to say there is no such thing either, but your comment changed my mind. eye opening.

Huh. Pretty clearly a dog/jackal though, right? Set was the god of Libya and was at war with the "good guy gods" in Egypt, so one has to assume the civilization based in Libya would be were we could correlate the answer -- and we have the contention that the Sahara has grown since the early days of Egypt, so its possible the definitive answer remains buried.

• guelo · 10 hours ago

  They already had a jackal god in Anubis which is represented without the weird down slopping snout and squared ears.

• emmelaich · 9 hours ago

  Aardvark to me. Similar snout, long ears. They were probably in the southern reaches of Egypt. With regard to differences that could be explained by stylisation and the lack of familiarity due to it's rarity in most of Egypt.

• asdff · 8 hours ago

  Could be a combination of stuff too like a birds beak shoved on a cat shoved on a human body.

  • card_zero · 8 hours ago

    See also: serpopards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpopard

• btilly · 4 hours ago

  From the article, "Egypt was conquered several times by foreign nations that the Egyptians perceived as worshiping Set." So while the Egyptians might have seen Set as the god of Libya, the Libyan representations might not be the one that Egyptians were comparing to.

Is it Cerebus the aardvark perhaps?

Terrible background choice for this article!

• abrowne · 6 hours ago

  I had to disable the body background-color with the web inspector to see any of the animal heads!

  • jolmg · 5 hours ago

    You can also drag the images. At least Firefox will put a white background on the dragged thumbnail.

• ks2048 · 4 hours ago

  Yes. Same image on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(deity)#/media/File:Set.sv...

I like to think Set's form is emergent and takes whatever form you want see, or a group of people want to see. Set sort of emerges from the chaos, and that's what his image does for me, sometimes I see a dog, sometimes an anteater and so on. I think the Egyptians probably imagine that the world is always emerging from the primal chaos, it's not something that simply occurred in the past, and it's up to us what we make of it.

That’s clearly a Groening rabbit.

As the Old Jaffa joke says: A serpent guard, a Horus guard, and a Setesh guard meet on a neutral planet. It is a tense moment. The serpent guard's eyes glow. The Horus guard's beak glistens. The Setesh guard's... nose drips.

• SA9G · 3 hours ago

  Too funny.... All I could literally think about while reading the article was the Goa'uld saying "Jaffa Kree!" Maybe I will give it another year of senility and watch it all over again... should have forgotten everything by then.

  • TeMPOraL · 14 minutes ago

    Same here. I read the headline, immediately guessed which god it's about, and hoped the good ol' Jaffa humor will be there waiting in the HN comments. Glad to see it as top comment. Recognition for the classics means there's still hope for humanity yet.

• tsimionescu · 3 hours ago

  As the older Babylonian joke says[0]: A dog enters a bar. He doesn't see anything, so he says "shall I open this door?" (the combination of an article about a mysterious aspect of such a well known ancient god and your joke made me think of this mysterious Babylonian joke, recorded from 1700 BCE but whose meaning we can only theorize about) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke#First_recorded_exampl...

• 21asdffdsa12 · 2 hours ago

  Indeed

Clearly he is an Irish Setter!

• emmelaich · 1 hour ago

  Borzoi?

anteater / aardvark looks like what Set is modeling back in the day

• hackernud3s · 4 hours ago

  From creation.com: > From their distribution today, it seems that after the Flood, the aardvarks headed south-west from the Ark’s landing site “in the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4). In the 4,500 years since, aardvarks have multiplied greatly to be widespread across sub-Saharan Africa. Yep, timing checks out.

It's a pikachu!

I don't understand why this should be such a mystery. Show it to a biologist or naturalist (and without the horrendous dark blue background behind the black head – didn't anyone look at the article before it was published?!), and the first response would probably be: "aardvark!" (or possibly "anteater!"). The aardvark's range covers much of the African continent; conceivably, it could have extended to Egypt, several thousand years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark