A Nile crocodile can reach five metres and takes prey at the water's edge, which in an agricultural society means people, cattle and children. Egyptians did not romanticise this. What they did instead was make the animal a god, and then keep individual crocodiles in temple pools, feed them by hand, hang jewellery on them and bury them with honours. Sobek is the clearest case in Egyptian religion of a strategy that recurs everywhere in it: take the thing that can kill you and put it on the payroll.
Two towns and a river
His principal cult centres are the Faiyum and Kom Ombo.
The Faiyum is a natural depression west of the Nile fed by a branch of the river, and in antiquity it held a substantial lake with a very large crocodile population. Its capital, Shedet, was called Crocodilopolis by the Greeks and later Arsinoe. The Twelfth Dynasty kings invested heavily in the region, and Sobek's standing rose with it. Herodotus and later Strabo both describe the sacred crocodile there — Strabo's account is the vivid one, with the animal, called Suchos, lying tame by the lake, priests prising open its jaws while a visitor's offering of cake, meat and honeyed wine is put in, after which the creature slides into the water and is chased round to the far side by the party.
Kom Ombo, north of Aswan, is a Ptolemaic temple with an unusual plan: it is doubled, with two parallel sets of gates, halls and sanctuaries on a shared axis. The southern half belongs to Sobek and the northern to Haroeris, Horus the Elder — two gods sharing a building without sharing a sanctuary, which is a solution to a local situation in which both had claims and neither would yield. The site also holds a well-known relief of medical and surgical instruments, and a modern museum of mummified crocodiles recovered nearby, including hatchlings and eggs.
Crocodile mummies survive in very large numbers, and their study has produced some of the odder discoveries in Egyptology: several of the large specimens have been found with juvenile crocodiles arranged on their backs, and at Tebtunis the papyrus used as wrapping and stuffing for crocodile mummies preserved a substantial cache of Greek and demotic documents. Waste paper packed into a reptile has given us tax receipts, letters and literature.
What he was actually asked for
His portfolio follows from the animal's habitat and behaviour rather than from any story.
- The Nile and its fertility. Crocodiles appear where the water is, and the annual inundation that made Egypt possible was his to bring; one epithet has the flood come from his sweat.
- Protection against crocodiles. Straightforwardly apotropaic: the god of the danger is the one who calls it off. Spells in the Book of the Dead deal with not being eaten, and magical stelae of the child Horus show him standing on crocodiles to bind them.
- Military power and royal aggression. New Kingdom royal texts use him for the pharaoh's ferocity in battle, and Middle Kingdom kings took the name Sobekhotep, "Sobek is content".
- Healing and virility, in the later periods particularly, where fat, dung and other crocodile products appear in medical and cosmetic prescriptions.
The fusion Sobek-Ra made him solar, which is an unlikely-looking merger until you notice that the crocodile emerges from the water at dawn to bask — a body coming up out of the deep into the light every morning is exactly the image Egyptian solar theology wanted. The Book of the Faiyum, a richly illustrated Greco-Roman composition, maps the whole region as a sacred landscape with the sun's course running through the lake and the god at its centre.
In the myths, marginally
He appears at the edges of the Osirian material rather than at its centre. In one tradition Sobek retrieves the parts of Osiris's body from the water, or gathers the hands of Horus after they are cut off and thrown into the river — a version in which the crocodile is the finder rather than the devourer. Some texts, contrarily, associate crocodiles with Set, who takes crocodile form among others when he is being defeated. Both associations were current, and no source resolves them.
His parentage is usually given as son of Neith of Sais, and the family tree draws it as such, though it is a late and loosely held connection rather than a fixture.
Greeks in the Faiyum
Greeks in Egypt engaged with him seriously — the Faiyum in the Ptolemaic period was a Greek settlement zone, and Sobek under the name Souchos received Greek dedications and had Greek-named priests. Roman-period papyri from the region are full of the ordinary administrative traffic of his temples.
His modern reception is comparatively small: he turns up in games as a straightforward monster-god and in a certain amount of fiction as a menace, which loses the fertility, the flood and the medicine and keeps only the teeth. Crocodilopolis has also had a durable second life as a name that sounds invented and is not.
Crocodile questions
Did people really keep live crocodiles in temples?
Yes, and the evidence is not only Greek travel writing. Temple architecture at several sites includes pools and ramps consistent with keeping large aquatic animals, papyri record rations and personnel for sacred animals, and the mummified remains include individuals that lived long enough and were fed well enough to reach substantial size. Some mummies show gold or gilded decoration and there are accounts of ornamented ears and forelimbs. Whether the treatment resembled Strabo's picnic scene at every site is another matter.
Was one crocodile the god, like the Apis bull?
The pattern is comparable but less rigid. The Apis at Memphis was a single animal identified by markings, succeeded on death after a search — a formal office. Sobek's sacred crocodiles appear to have been more numerous and less tightly regulated, with several sites keeping their own, and the Greek sources describe a resident animal rather than a unique national one. Egyptian sacred-animal practice ranged from the strictly singular to the industrial-scale votive burials seen with ibises and cats.
Why does he sometimes wear the plumed crown of Amun?
Because Sobek-Ra, once solar, attracted the atef and plumed headgear used for major solar and royal deities, and the Ptolemaic period in particular piled composite crowns onto gods as a way of asserting scope. Headgear in Egyptian art functions as a claim about a deity's reach, and a local crocodile god wearing the regalia of a national one is a statement made by his own priesthood.