Taweret

Also Known As: Ta-weret, “the Great [Female] One”; Greek Thoeris; closely related to and often indistinguishable from the hippopotamus goddesses Ipet, Reret and Hedjet
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A composite of the three animals Egyptians most feared for the ferocity with which they defended their young, turned outward as a weapon against anything that threatened a mother or a newborn.
Role in Mythos: The household guardian of pregnancy, birth and infancy, whose worship happened at bedsides and domestic shrines rather than in state temples.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary Egyptians wore her as an amulet, carved her onto birth wands, beds, headrests and feeding cups, and set her image in shrines at home in the hope of a living child. She was among the most widely owned deities in Egypt precisely because she belonged to no priesthood and needed none.

The wand is hippopotamus ivory, curved like the tusk it was cut from, and the tip is worn smooth. Someone dragged it through the sand of a bedroom floor, over and over, around a woman in labour or a sleeping child, closing a circle nothing was meant to cross. Along its length march lions, frogs, vultures, jackals, and on roughly three quarters of the two hundred and thirty or so examples that survive, a hippopotamus standing on her hind legs. That is Taweret. She is not inside the circle. She is the circle.

She is put together out of the worst animals in Egypt. Head and body belong to a hippopotamus, and not a hippopotamus in general but a pregnant one, heavy and low through the belly. Her paws and legs are a lioness’s. A crocodile’s tail runs down her back and trails on the ground behind her. Her arms are human, her breasts human and heavy, read by some as a nursing woman’s and by others as an old woman’s, and the sources have never settled it. She wears a long wig parted into three lappets, often a flat cylindrical modius on top of it, sometimes the horned sun disk that Hathor and Isis wear. Her mouth tends to be open far enough to show tusks and tongue. She stands upright, which no hippopotamus does.

None of that is decorative. The crocodile, the lion and the hippopotamus were the three creatures in the Nile valley most notorious for what they would do to anything that came near their offspring, and Taweret is those three defensive furies bundled into one body and aimed outward. Egyptian goddesses are usually slim and beautiful. She is deliberately not. The nearest thing to her in the Egyptian visual imagination is Ammit, the devourer who waits under the scales in the judgement hall, assembled from the same menu of jaws. The difference is entirely a matter of which way the teeth are pointing.

Her name says the same thing more quietly. Ta-weret means the great one, female, and the Greeks who met her later rendered it Thoeris. Under her forepaws on amulet after amulet sits a loop of bound reed with the ends turned down, the sa sign, which reads simply “protection.” The same shape may have been a real object once, a papyrus float; boatmen in a Fifth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara wear something very like it looped across the chest while they work the water. When she is not resting on it she is often holding a knife.

No story survives of how she came to be. There is no birth, no parentage, no genealogy fixing her into a divine family, which is unusual for a deity this popular. Hippopotami swim across Egyptian pottery as early as 3850 BCE, before the pharaohs, and upright hippo amulets are being made by the Old Kingdom. She seems to have come out of the river rather than out of a myth.

What narrative she does attract is borrowed and slightly uneasy. The hippopotamus in Egyptian myth is not only maternal; it is also the shape Seth takes when he fights Horus for the throne of Egypt and loses, harpooned on the temple walls at Edfu. Being built from ferocious animals put Taweret uncomfortably close to that, and ostraca from the workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina suggest she had a demonic aspect of her own that people took seriously. In one telling of the quarrel it is Taweret who pins Seth down while Horus finishes the work. A goddess made of predators was never going to be safe, only reliably on your side.

Her cult ran on domestic ground. There were no great temples to Taweret and no state clergy, though she may have had a sanctuary at Deir el-Medina, and her image turns up on the beds, stools and headrests people actually used. Votive stelae name her as a healer. On the outer walls of Ptolemaic temples her image was set to keep evil off the building. When Akhenaten shut the old gods down and moved the court to Amarna, excavators still found Taweret there, in the private houses of the town built to worship the sun disk alone. Nobody appears to have asked permission.

The most vivid evidence is a mudbrick. In 2001 the archaeologist Josef Wegner found a painted birth brick at South Abydos, in the women’s quarters of a house associated with a noblewoman called Renseneb, who lived in the Thirteenth Dynasty. Egyptian women gave birth squatting, braced on a pair of bricks. This one measures fourteen inches by seven, and five of its six faces still hold their paint: a seated mother with her newborn on her lap, two female attendants flanking her, staffs topped with Hathor’s face framing the scene, and around the sides a procession of guardians including a cobra, a baboon, a desert cat standing in for the sun god, and a hippopotamus deity who is very probably Taweret. It is the only such brick known. A woman put her weight on those painted figures at the worst hour of her life.

The same logic runs through everything else made for infants. Feeding cups carry her image so that the milk inside picks up the protection. There are vessels shaped like pregnant women, and “Taweret vessels” pierced at the nipples for pouring milk. Wands carry inscriptions in the voice of the guardians themselves: “We have come that we may extend our protection around the healthy child Minhotep, alive, sound and healthy, born of the noblewoman Sitsobek.” The parallel behind all of it is the sun’s night journey, which requires an escort through the dark and comes out alive at dawn, and the wands were buried with the dead for the same reason.

Her powers are exactly the powers of that terrifying silhouette. She frightens off what would otherwise get at a mother, an infant or a sleeper, and the fright is the mechanism; there is no subtler magic underneath it. She carries protection as a sign she can rest her whole weight on. Her epithets reach further than the birthing room: “She of the Pure Water,” and at a shrine at Gebel es-Silsila “The One Who Is in the Waters of Nun,” tying her to the inundation that fed the country, and “She Who Removes the Water,” which is almost certainly about the breaking of the waters in labour. She guards the sun as it rises and has a hand in the rebirth of the dead. She even reached the sky. On the ceiling of Senenmut’s tomb at Thebes, cut around 1470 BCE and the earliest complete map of the Egyptian heavens known, a great female hippopotamus stands among the northern constellations, in the stars we call Draco. She stands there still on the Osiris chapel at Medinet Habu. Her reach also crossed borders, to Crete and south to Kerma and Meroe in Nubia.

The limits are just as clear. She has no myth cycle of her own to be strong in, no temple estate, no festival calendar that survives, no theology; she is a goddess of the moment of danger and of nothing else. The medical papyri, which are otherwise remarkably practical about the body, say nothing at all about how to manage a birth, so the whole apparatus of protection rests on magic and on the women in the room. Her circle is drawn in sand and has to be drawn again. The wands themselves show it: worn at the tip, some of them cracked and carefully repaired, then used again. And the record of that period is blunt about the odds. Roughly half the graves excavated at Gurob, Matmar and Mostagedda held children and infants.

In the Egyptian Museum in Cairo there is a statue of Taweret in dark, hard stone. The belly is polished to a shine that no ancient sculptor put there. It came from the hands of modern Egyptian women who came to the museum and rubbed it, hoping to conceive. The statue is behind glass now, and they come anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Taweret in Egyptian mythology?

Taweret is the ancient Egyptian goddess who protected pregnant women, women in labour and young children. Her name means “the Great One,” and she was one of the most widely owned deities in Egypt, though she had no large state temple and no official priesthood. Her worship happened in homes, at bedsides and in small domestic shrines.

What animals is Taweret made of?

Taweret has the head and body of a pregnant hippopotamus, the legs and paws of a lioness, the tail of a crocodile, and human arms and breasts. Those three animals were chosen because Egyptians considered them the fiercest defenders of their own young. She stands upright rather than on all fours, and she often wears a long wig with a flat cylindrical headdress or a horned sun disk.

What does Taweret carry?

Taweret usually rests on or holds the sa sign, a looped bundle of reed that is the Egyptian hieroglyph for “protection.” She frequently carries a knife as well, used to drive off hostile forces. Both appear constantly on the faience amulets that pregnant and nursing women wore.

How was Taweret used to protect women in childbirth?

Her image was carved onto curved wands of hippopotamus ivory that a magician dragged through the sand to draw a protective circle around a woman in labour or a sleeping child. She also appears on birth bricks, feeding cups, beds, stools and headrests. A hippopotamus goddess, most likely Taweret, appears on around three quarters of the roughly 230 surviving Middle Kingdom wands.

Is Taweret good or evil?

Taweret was protective rather than punitive, but her power came from being genuinely frightening. She was assembled from dangerous animals, which associated her with Seth and the chaotic side of the hippopotamus, and ostraca from Deir el-Medina indicate she was also credited with a demonic aspect. In practice Egyptians treated her as a fierce ally rather than a gentle one.