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.
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.
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.
Could be a combination of stuff too like a birds beak shoved on a cat shoved on a human body.
See also: serpopards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpopard
They already had a jackal god in Anubis which is represented without the weird down slopping snout and squared ears.
There is no conclusion in this article if you care about such things.
The great thing about history is that there can only be conjectures, never conclusions.
Unless you invent a time machine of course.
i meant to say there is no such thing either, but your comment changed my mind. eye opening.
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.
Clearly he is an Irish Setter!
That’s clearly a Groening rabbit.
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.
Is it Cerebus the aardvark perhaps?
Terrible background choice for this article!
I had to disable the body background-color with the web inspector to see any of the animal heads!
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.