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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I believe it is best left to fantasy now anyway, personally.. Set is indeed a random seed; may as well be "an alien races head" as anything else, given the actual utility of Set, contextually, in the dogma. '?'-Set is fine by me.
The value of a 'mystery head' may actually indeed have been the intention of the original artists. A '*'-char for Ra.
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.
The Greeks popularized the epithet of Jews being donkey-worshippers there is evidence that it predates this and since Set, Typhon, and Yahweh are in some aspects syncretic, by induction and by appearance I can't see how it isn't a donkey.
the problem is we have zero remains of aardvarks/anteaters in Egypt, nor any discussion of them being in the area. So it could be, but it could just as well be anything else.
Could it be that someone described an anteater but the artist had never seen one, especially if these are gods of another culture that have been adpoted? There are all sorts of lions, hippos and elephants in medieval illuminated manuscripts that are pretty clearly the result of a telephone game description of the animal.
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.
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.
#/media/File:Set.svg){kind=link}
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.
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