Sobek

The lake at Shedet held one crocodile that mattered. Gold hung at its ears, bracelets sat on its forefeet, and when a visitor arrived with an offering the priests hurried round the water, took hold of the animal, prised the jaws apart and put in a small cake, then dressed meat, then poured a mixture of honey and milk down its throat. Strabo watched this done and wrote it down. The animal, fed, slid back into the shallows without hurry. The Greeks called it Suchus. The Egyptians knew what it was: their god, breathing, in the water, waiting to be fed again.

The god’s name in Egyptian was Sbk, which we say as Sobek, and even that short word is argued over. One reading takes it from a causative of the verb meaning to impregnate. Another makes it a participle of a verb meaning to unite, which would render him the one who gathers back together what has been scattered. Both readings fit him, which is the difficulty and also the pleasure of him. He is a god of raw fertility and a god of reassembly, and the record never chose between the two.

He is old. His name sits in the Pyramid Texts, the earliest body of religious writing Egypt has left us, in a spell cut into the burial chamber of the Fifth Dynasty king Unas. There the dead king becomes the god: Unis is Sobek, green of plumage, with alert face and raised fore, the splashing one who came from the thigh and tail of the great goddess in the sunlight. A few lines on he is named as Neith’s son. What follows is not decorous. The king eats with his mouth, urinates, takes women from their husbands wherever his heart fancies. This is not a gentle deity being flattered. It is a crocodile, given a throne.

Egyptian artists drew him two ways and never settled between them. Sometimes he is simply the animal, low and long on a shrine, tail heavy behind him, the ridged back cut in stone with the scutes picked out one by one. Sometimes he stands as a man with the crocodile’s head set on human shoulders, jaws slightly parted, wearing a plumed crown with a sun disc between ram’s horns. The animal behind the image is the largest predator in the river, armoured across the back, able to lie so still in shallow water that it reads as a waterlogged log until the instant it stops being one. Egyptian sculptors knew it intimately and it shows. The eyes ride high, the snout is broad, and the sheer weight of the thing comes through even in a bronze small enough to hold.

His epithets are not what a temple usually advertises. He who loves robbery. He who eats while he also mates. Pointed of teeth. The priesthood never softened him, because his usefulness lay precisely in what he was. A god who could be relied on to be savage was a god worth having between you and the water. He was never made nice.

The Faiyum was his. Egyptians called that green depression southwest of Memphis the Land of the Lake, after the great sheet of water the Greeks named Moeris, and the whole region worked as one extended cult centre. Sobek came into his full prominence there during the Middle Kingdom, above all under Amenemhat III of the Twelfth Dynasty, who took a particular interest in the Faiyum and built for its god. Royal names followed the devotion: the dynasty closed with a queen called Sobekneferu, the beauty of Sobek, and the Thirteenth Dynasty produced a long line of kings named Sobekhotep, Sobek is content. Almost every town in the district then bred its own version of him. Soknebtunis at Tebtunis. Sokonnokonni at Bacchias. Souxei, somewhere in the region that has never been located. At Karanis two forms were served side by side, Pnepheros and Petsuchos, and the cult image of Petsuchos was a mummified crocodile.

The Middle Kingdom also changed what he was. He was fused with Horus, the falcon of divine kingship, and Sobek-Horus set him directly alongside the throne and, through Horus, inside the family of Osiris and Isis. From that adoption came his strangest role. He becomes bound up with Isis as a healer of the murdered Osiris, and it is here that the second reading of his name earns its keep, the one that makes him he who unites the dismembered limbs. The animal that pulls things apart is put to work putting one back together.

Through Horus he acquired the sun, and in the last native dynasties and then under the Ptolemies and Rome the fusion hardened into Sobek-Ra. A book was written for him locally, the Book of the Faiyum, and enough copies survive in enough variants that Egyptologists suspect it sold briskly. Much of it follows the daily journey of Sobek-Ra with the movement of the sun. Instead of the solar barque crossing the sky, the god swims. He rises out of the first water the way the world itself rose out of Nun, and he carries the light through Lake Moeris, which in that text is less a landscape than a theology with a map drawn over it. A tradition repeated everywhere has the Nile itself running from his sweat. The texts are considerably less confident about that than the retellings are.

Outside the Faiyum his great house stood at Kom Ombo, about thirty miles north of Aswan, raised through the Ptolemaic period and extended under Rome. Per-Sobek, the house of Sobek, is one of the oddest buildings in Egypt: a double temple, mirrored along its long axis, the southern half for Sobek with Hathor and the child Khonsu, the northern half for Haroeris, Horus the Elder, with Tasenetnofret and the child Panebtawy. Two triads, two processional routes, one structure, everything doubled and nothing shared. Part of the Book of the Faiyum was copied onto its walls, hundreds of miles upriver from the lake it describes. In the northwest of the complex a round well shaft steps down through the rock to the water table, a nilometer, where priests read the coming flood off marked stone and the state read its taxes off the priests.

The crocodiles themselves were bred, killed, wrapped and buried in enormous numbers. At Shedet a specialist clergy handled it, men carrying titles like prophet of the crocodile gods and one who buries the bodies of the crocodile gods of the Land of the Lake. What survives is strange and unexpectedly tender. Some mummified adults have hatchlings laid in their open mouths and along their backs, the posture in which a female crocodile carries her young, since it is one of the few reptiles that tends its offspring at all. Eggs were wrapped and offered as well, which suited a god who had become solar and cyclical. Resin, linen, the close animal smell of a workshop that never stopped: an entire industry founded on the observation that the most frightening thing in the river is also a careful mother.

What he offered in return was protection of a narrow and practical kind. He kept the river survivable. Amulets, small stelae and votive figures came to him from ordinary people, especially in the later periods, from anyone who worked on or beside the water and understood exactly what lived in it. His ferocity was the mechanism, simply pointed outward. The dead wanted a share of it too. A Coffin Text spell lets the deceased take his shape, and the Book of the Dead keeps the option open at spell 88, a formula for becoming a crocodile, filed among the transformation spells that let the dead travel as a swallow, a falcon, a phoenix. Of everything on that menu, the form that goes into the water and cannot be argued with had obvious appeal.

His limits were geographic and they were sharp. Herodotus noticed it. Around Thebes and Lake Moeris the crocodile was sacred, kept and fed, hung with glass and gold at the ears and bracelets on the forefeet, embalmed at death and laid in consecrated coffins. At Elephantine, upriver, nobody held it sacred at all, and people ate it. Same animal, same god, a few days of sailing apart. Nothing in his nature settled that argument, because his authority was always local and negotiated town by town, and a god of the Faiyum was not therefore a god of the cataract. The other limit sat in the animal. A crocodile can be kept in a pool and taught to take a cake from a priest’s hands, and it is still a crocodile. Egypt worshipped him with its eyes open. It fed the thing in the lake because feeding it was better than the alternative, and it never pretended anything else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sobek in Egyptian mythology?

Sobek is the ancient Egyptian crocodile god, associated with the Nile, fertility, royal power and military force. He appears as early as the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom and was still worshipped in the Roman period, making him one of the longest-serving deities in the Egyptian pantheon. He was known to the Greeks and Romans as Suchos or Suchus.

What did Sobek look like?

Sobek was shown either as a Nile crocodile or as a man with a crocodile’s head. In his human-bodied form he often wears a plumed crown with ram’s horns and a sun disc, especially in his later fused identity as Sobek-Ra. Egyptian artists rendered the crocodile’s ridged hide, broad snout and high-set eyes with close observational accuracy.

Where was Sobek worshipped?

His heartland was the Faiyum, the region Egyptians called the Land of the Lake, centred on the city of Shedet, which the Greeks named Crocodilopolis. Individual Faiyum towns kept their own local forms of him, including Soknebtunis at Tebtunis and Petsuchos at Karanis. Outside the Faiyum, his largest cult centre was the double temple of Kom Ombo in southern Egypt, which he shared with Horus the Elder.

Why did Egyptians mummify crocodiles for Sobek?

Live crocodiles were raised as earthly manifestations of Sobek, and at death they were mummified and buried as sacred objects. Some crocodile mummies were prepared with hatchlings placed in the mouth and along the back, reflecting the way a female crocodile carries her young and emphasising Sobek’s protective side. Mummified crocodile eggs were also offered, tied to his solar and cyclical aspect as Sobek-Ra.

Was Sobek a good or an evil god?

Sobek was neither, and the Egyptians did not try to make him one. His epithets are openly brutal, including “he who loves robbery” and “pointed of teeth”, yet he was also a healer associated with the restoration of Osiris and a protector invoked against the dangers of the river. His violence was the point: it was believed to be aimed outward, at whatever threatened the people who honoured him.

Related Entries

Horus, Osiris, Isis, Set, Neith, Ra, Hathor, Khnum, Hapi, Ahemait, Taweret, Apep/Apophis, Makara, Zipacna