Serpopard

The grinding hollow on the Narmer Palette is not really a hollow. It is a circle drawn by two animals. Their bodies face away from each other, planted on four feline legs, and their necks rise and bend and cross and come back around until the gap between them closes into a shallow dish where green malachite was once ground to paste. Two men stand behind them, one to each animal, holding ropes. Whatever these things are, they are not loose.

They have no name. Nothing that survives from Egypt or Mesopotamia records what they were called, what they wanted, or what happened to them. Serpopard is a modern word, a splice of serpent and leopard made by people looking at the carvings thousands of years afterward, and it has stuck firmly enough that museum labels now use it without apology. The name is a guess. The animal is real in the only way it was ever real: it exists in stone and ivory, cut with great care, again and again, by craftsmen who never wrote a line about it.

The carving quarrels with its own modern name. Look closely at the palette beasts and the leopard falls away. There are no spots. The tail ends in the tuft that belongs to a lion. The head is round-eared, and serpents do not have ears, nor is there a scale, a forked tongue or a wedge-shaped reptile skull anywhere on the thing. What is left is a lioness, stretched. The neck is the whole invention, long and smooth and boneless-looking, and on the palettes it does a job that has nothing to do with anatomy: it makes a frame. It loops the cosmetic circle. It fills the register. Whether the sculptors understood it as a snake’s neck on a cat, or simply as a cat drawn long because the composition needed a curve, is not something the objects will say.

The finest of them is in Oxford. The Two Dog Palette, siltstone, forty-two and a half centimetres tall, came out of the Main Deposit in the temple precinct at Hierakonpolis during the 1897 to 1898 season, and it is a crowded, violent, gorgeous object. Two African wild dogs stand at the top with their heads meeting over the edge. Below them a pair of serpent-necked cats bend their necks around the grinding circle and lower their heads to a fallen gazelle, tongues out, licking the body. Beneath that, saluki hounds pull down ibexes. Turn the palette over and the left-hand side becomes a procession of killers moving into the herds of North Africa: lions, another serpent-necked cat, a leopard, a hyena, and a griffin with wings like the teeth of a comb. At the bottom of it all sits a long-tailed doglike creature wearing a belt and playing an end-blown flute, and nobody has satisfactorily explained him either.

Palettes had been buried with the dead since around 4400 BC, plain slabs of siltstone for grinding pigment. Between roughly 3300 and 3000 BC they swelled into ceremonial objects, carved in shallow relief on both faces with imagery bound up with kingship, and the serpent-necked cat arrives with that change. It is on the Narmer Palette in Cairo, cut in green schist and dug from the same Hierakonpolis deposit. It is on a grauwacke palette in the Louvre, thirty-two centimetres of dogs, giraffes, an ibis and a lion, catalogued with the flat honesty of a museum register as an animal hybride.

The motif is older and commoner further east. On cylinder seals of the Uruk period in Mesopotamia, from around 3500 to 3000 BC, the long-necked beasts appear in pairs with their necks knotted together, and there they are not roped, not led, not conquered. Henri Frankfort read the Mesopotamian menagerie of hybrids as manifestations of a chthonic power, the vitality that breaks out of the ground in every living thing. In Egypt the same shape is put to a harder use. The animals are held, or they are hunted, or they are hunting, and the king is the reason. One reading takes them for the chaos that reigned outside Egypt’s borders, brought under a royal hand.

How the image travelled is guesswork of a respectable kind. Trade moved goods up and down the routes between Mesopotamia and the Nile, and sealed containers carried seal impressions with them, which is to say that the picture could have come to Egypt as packaging. Egypt’s earliest kings took it and used it, and whatever it had meant in Uruk, in Hierakonpolis it meant that the man on the palette commanded creatures that did not exist.

Then it goes quiet. The serpent-necked cat is absent from Old Kingdom art altogether, and reappears a thousand years later in one of the strangest object classes Egypt produced. Middle Kingdom apotropaic wands, sometimes called birth tusks, were made from hippopotamus canine teeth split lengthwise into two curved blades, one face flat and one convex, the ivory so dense it is punishing to carve. Around a hundred and fifty survive in museums. Along their length march processions of protectors: Taweret with her knife, the dwarf god who would become Bes, the frog goddess Heqet, lions, scarabs, snakes, and among them the serpent-necked cat, now with a spotted coat. On a wand in the British Museum it stands between a snake’s head and a seated ape holding a wedjat eye. On another, in Baltimore, it carries the sa-sign, the hieroglyph for protection, on its back.

Its powers are the powers of a shape. It encircles, and what it encircles is enclosed. It intercepts, and what it intercepts does not pass. Set on the flat of a wand laid across a labouring woman or a sleeping child, it was one more body between the household and whatever came at night. Its limits are just as plain. It never acts alone, never speaks, never appears without other animals or other gods beside it, and on the palettes it is almost always shown at the moment of being controlled, with a rope on it and a man at the other end. For a creature carved for something like fifteen hundred years across two civilisations, it accumulated no biography whatsoever.

That single wand in Baltimore is the closest thing to a caption anyone left. A spotted cat with an impossible neck, walking in a line of gods, wearing the sign for protection like a saddle. It is the one occasion an Egyptian carver told us what the animal was for, and he did it without using a word.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a serpopard?

A serpopard is a mythical animal from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, shown as a big cat with an extremely long, snakelike neck. It appears on Predynastic Egyptian ceremonial palettes, on Mesopotamian cylinder seals of the Uruk period, and later on Middle Kingdom Egyptian protective wands. No surviving ancient text describes it or tells a story about it.

Is “serpopard” the creature’s real name?

No. Serpopard is a modern coinage combining “serpent” and “leopard”, invented by scholars describing the carvings. There is no known name for the creature in any ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian text, and it is also called the serpent-necked lion or serpent-necked feline.

Where does the serpopard appear on the Narmer Palette?

On the Narmer Palette, two serpopards stand in the central register with their necks crossed and looped to enclose the shallow circle where cosmetic pigment was ground. Each animal is held on a rope by a human handler. The pairing is often read as the king bringing opposing forces under control.

Is the serpopard a leopard or a lion?

The carvings look more like a lioness than a leopard. On the palettes the animal has no spots, a tufted lion’s tail, and small rounded ears rather than a reptile’s head, though the versions carved on Middle Kingdom wands do have spotted coats. The leopard in the modern name is an interpretation, not a description drawn from any ancient source.

Why do serpopards appear on Egyptian birth wands?

Middle Kingdom apotropaic wands, carved from hippopotamus tusk, were covered with protective figures believed to guard mothers and infants. The serpent-necked feline marches among them alongside Taweret, Heqet and the dwarf god Aha, and on one example in the Walters Art Museum it carries the sa-sign for protection on its back, which indicates it was understood as a guardian.

Related Entries

Sphinx, Sekhmet, Bast (Bastet), Mafdet, Akhekh, Taweret, Bes, Heqet, Horus, Set, Maat, Lamassu, Shedu, Sirrush, Griffin (or Gryphon)