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evandrofisico 20 hours ago [-]
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.
tsimionescu 16 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)
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?"
actionfromafar 12 hours ago [-]
I hope it's a deadpan joke that the dog can not only speak, but does so like any other bar patron.
SA9G 16 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 12 hours 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.
21asdffdsa12 14 hours ago [-]
Indeed
tomrod 22 hours ago [-]
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.
FromTheFirstIn 8 hours ago [-]
If experts have disagreed about it for longer than you’ve been alive it seems like arrogance to say it’s pretty clearly anything.
emmelaich 22 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.
btilly 16 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.
guelo 22 hours ago [-]
They already had a jackal god in Anubis which is represented without the weird down slopping snout and squared ears.
asdff 21 hours ago [-]
Could be a combination of stuff too like a birds beak shoved on a cat shoved on a human body.
If this is not a dog then we should cast doubt over the identity of the other animals we think we know too.
jjtheblunt 18 hours ago [-]
anteater / aardvark looks like what Set is modeling back in the day
__alexs 12 hours ago [-]
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.
jjtheblunt 5 hours ago [-]
in the article:
> ...Aardvarks, which the Egyptians could plausibly have encountered on their trading trips farther south into Africa.
hackernud3s 16 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.
cgriswald 21 hours ago [-]
That’s clearly a Groening rabbit.
pluc 23 hours ago [-]
There is no conclusion in this article if you care about such things.
ludamn 23 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 22 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 21 hours ago [-]
i meant to say there is no such thing either, but your comment changed my mind.
eye opening.
I had to disable the body background-color with the web inspector to see any of the animal heads!
jolmg 18 hours ago [-]
You can also drag the images. At least Firefox will put a white background on the dragged thumbnail.
abrowne 4 hours ago [-]
I am not seeing that on Firefox (beta/157) on Linux or Mac.
18 hours ago [-]
astral_drama 22 hours ago [-]
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.
harimau777 19 hours ago [-]
Clearly he is an Irish Setter!
emmelaich 14 hours ago [-]
Borzoi?
Skwid 11 hours ago [-]
I've heard saluki as a genuine theory
stronglikedan 6 hours ago [-]
it's clearly an anteater ::shrug::
dyzone 17 hours ago [-]
It's a pikachu!
fractallyte 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Obscurity4340 7 hours ago [-]
The Greeks were sort of ass-worshippers in their own way, its called Calliphygian and it means something like "nice ass haver"
riffraff 11 hours ago [-]
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.
kjs3 2 hours ago [-]
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.
fsckboy 23 hours ago [-]
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.
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)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke#First_recorded_exampl...
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?"
Glad to see it as top comment. Recognition for the classics means there's still hope for humanity yet.
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.
With regard to differences that could be explained by stylisation and the lack of familiarity due to it's rarity in most of Egypt.
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.
> ...Aardvarks, which the Egyptians could plausibly have encountered on their trading trips farther south into Africa.
> 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.
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.
Unless you invent a time machine of course.
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
EDIT: also, wrong tail.
the Set animal has a snout that is more bird/reptile-like. the ears are a cipher.