Was Scepter

Two metres of turquoise glaze, and it weighs as much as a grown man. Flinders Petrie came upon it in 1894 in the wreck of a temple to Seth at Nubt, in the Naqada region on the west bank opposite Koptos, and it came out of the ground in fragments. Reassembled, it stands 215.9 centimetres and weighs 65 kilograms, the largest object of Egyptian faience anyone has recovered. Faience is not clay. It is powdered quartz, glazed turquoise by the addition of copper, and at that scale it slumps, cracks and tears itself apart in the kiln. Someone wanted this particular shape badly enough to fight the material for it.

The shape is a was scepter. The word behind it is wꜣs, meaning power or dominion, and the staff is also the hieroglyph that writes the word: a straight shaft, an animal head at the top with squared ears and a long blunt muzzle, and a foot that forks into two prongs like a tuning fork or a pair of thin legs. Sign lists file it as S40. A close relative with a wavy shaft, S41, writes a different word, djam, and belongs to a different scepter. The straight one is the one that is everywhere, in painted tombs, on coffin sides, cut into temple walls, threaded onto necklaces.

Whose head sits on top is a question the catalogues answer carefully. The V&A, which owns the giant, says only that the animal probably represents Seth. Others read it as Anubis, or as Khnum. The most common identification is the Set animal, the long-eared, sharp-snouted creature that walks through Egyptian art without ever matching anything alive, and if that reading holds, then the was is a god of storms and disorder held by the neck and carried about as a walking stick. Later Egyptian usage leans that way, treating the staff as mastery over the chaos Seth embodied. The forked base has been taken for the same animal’s tail.

On temple walls the was belongs to gods before it belongs to anyone else. It appears in their fists in scene after scene, planted upright while the other hand does the work of the composition. In the standard gesture a deity leans toward the king and holds the looped ankh close to his face, the was standing straight beside him with its fork on the floor, so that life arrives at the nostrils and dominion arrives through the hand. The king receives both. He does not take them.

That pairing hardened into a formula. The was travels with the ankh and with the djed pillar, and the three together run along the bottom of walls and around the rims of objects like a refrain, three nouns repeated: life, stability, power. Richard Wilkinson reads the was specifically as effective power, the working kind, authority that actually reaches the thing it is pointed at.

The scepter also holds up the sky. Egyptian cosmology set the heavens on four pillars at the corners of the world, and those pillars were sometimes drawn as was staffs, four enormous forked rods standing in the dark with the whole ceiling of the world resting on their animal heads. A staff for power is not a strange thing. A staff that keeps the roof from falling in is a different proposition entirely.

Closer to the ground, the same sign named a place. The fourth nome of Upper Egypt, the district of Thebes, was called Waset, and its emblem was the was, so the city that eventually ran the country wrote its own name with a picture of dominion.

It went into the grave as well. In funerary use the was was made responsible for the wellbeing of the dead, painted onto coffins, worked into tomb equipment, and shrunk down into amulets to be worn or wrapped with the body. When Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon dug the tomb of Amenhotep III in the West Valley in 1915, one of the small things they lifted out was a faience amulet two and a half centimetres high: an ankh with a was scepter standing on either side of it, the whole thing smaller than a thumb joint, doing in miniature what the temple reliefs did across acres of wall.

The earliest examples go back to the First Dynasty, which puts the shape close to the beginning of Egyptian writing itself. No surviving text explains where it came from. That silence is ordinary for a sign this old; the Egyptians inherited it along with everything else and used it for three thousand years without feeling obliged to account for it.

The Nubt scepter is the outlier that shows what the object could become when a king paid for it. Thutmose I built the temple it stood in; Amenhotep II, a ruler remembered for horsemanship and for nine years of hard campaigning before a quiet reign of building, had this thing made and inscribed with his full titulary down the front of the shaft, with two more cartouches carrying his name. It once had arms. They came out from the shaft at sharp angles and broke off at the elbows, so nobody now knows whether they held a standard or were lifted in worship, and the black paint on them, bands and pear-shaped dots and a diamond lattice, stops at the fracture. The bottom finishes in a pair of stubby legs. It was temple equipment rather than regalia, an object that lived in a sanctuary and was looked at.

What the was grants is authority that holds. It is not a weapon and no story has anyone strike with it. Its power is conferring, stabilising, protective: the god gives it, the king holds it, the sky rests on it, the dead are kept well by it. Its limits sit in the same place. The was has no myth of its own, no theft, no quest, no moment where it is lost and recovered, because it is an attribute rather than a character, and attributes do not get adventures. And being an object, it breaks. The largest one ever made was found smashed, its arms gone at the elbows, and it survives only because a man with a trowel spent 1894 picking the pieces out of a ruined temple floor.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the was scepter?

The was scepter is an ancient Egyptian staff symbolising power and dominion, and also the hieroglyph that writes the word wꜣs, meaning power. It has a straight shaft, a stylised animal head at the top, and a forked foot. Examples survive in wood and in faience, and the earliest date to the First Dynasty.

Which Egyptian gods carry the was scepter?

Many of them do, since it is a general emblem of divine power rather than one god’s personal weapon. It is most closely associated with Seth, whose animal head is the usual identification for the head on the staff, and it is also linked to Anubis and Khnum. Gods are regularly shown passing it to the pharaoh, often alongside the ankh.

What does the animal head on the was scepter represent?

The identification is not settled. The commonest reading is the Set animal, the sharp-snouted creature associated with the god Seth, and the Victoria and Albert Museum labels its own monumental example as probably Seth. Other readings identify the head with Anubis or with Khnum.

Where is the largest was scepter?

The largest known was scepter is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, accession number 437-1895. Made of blue-green glazed faience and inscribed for Amenhotep II, it stands 215.9 centimetres tall and weighs 65 kilograms, making it the largest surviving object of ancient Egyptian faience. Flinders Petrie found it in fragments in 1894 in a temple of Seth at Nubt.

Why was the was scepter placed in tombs?

In a funerary setting the was was held responsible for the wellbeing of the dead, so it was painted on coffins, built into tomb equipment, and made into small amulets buried with the body. A faience amulet combining an ankh with two was scepters was recovered from the tomb of Amenhotep III in 1915. The idea is continuity: the dominion a person held in life is supposed to hold in the afterlife too.

Related Entries

Set, Anubis, Khnum, Ankh, Crook and Flail, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Ra, Ptah, Thoth, Maat, Wadjet, Scarab, Duat