The mystery animal on an ancient god's head | Hacker News Reader

The mystery animal on an ancient god's head

signoregalilei.com

154 pointssurprisetalk44 comments

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.

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.

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.

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...

I hope it's a deadpan joke that the dog can not only speak, but does so like any other bar patron.

> "éš-dam", can also be translated as "brothel"

My own personal guess "I cannot see anything" may mean "blind". door could be a choice of brothel rooms. so basically

"A blind 'dog' enters a brothel and asks, which hooker should I take?"

Indeed

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.

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

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

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.

If this is not a dog then we should cast doubt over the identity of the other animals we think we know too.

If experts have disagreed about it for longer than you’ve been alive it seems like arrogance to say it’s pretty clearly anything.

That’s clearly a Groening rabbit.

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

There is no evidence Aardvarks in egypt at that time. I think we'd probably expect at least a few aardvark bones if it was.

in the article:

> ...Aardvarks, which the Egyptians could plausibly have encountered on their trading trips farther south into Africa.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

I am not seeing that on Firefox (beta/157) on Linux or Mac.

Maybe it depends on your Firefox/system theme.

FWIW, the Readability extension sorted it in a single click for me.

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

Is it Cerebus the aardvark perhaps?

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

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.

EDIT: also, wrong tail.

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.

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 Greeks were sort of ass-worshippers in their own way, its called Calliphygian and it means something like "nice ass haver"

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.

Clearly he is an Irish Setter!

Borzoi?

I've heard saluki as a genuine theory

It's a pikachu!

it's clearly an anteater ::shrug::

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