Taweret is built out of the three animals most likely to kill an Egyptian. She has the body of a pregnant hippopotamus standing upright on its hind legs, the forelegs and paws of a lioness, the back and tail of a crocodile, and human breasts. Her name means simply "the great one", in the feminine.
The design is not a whimsical mash-up. Hippopotamuses were the most dangerous large animals in the Nile — territorial, fast in water, and responsible for deaths and capsized boats; crocodiles took people at the bank; lions took livestock and people at the desert edge. Egyptian protective thinking took the three and assembled them into one figure standing in a doorway on your side. The logic is identical to that behind Anubis as a jackal and Sobek as a crocodile: recruit the threat.
She usually holds a sa sign, a looped reed bundle meaning protection, resting it on the floor like a shield, and she frequently carries a knife or a torch.
The most dangerous room in Egypt
Childbirth killed women and infants at rates that are hard to overstate, and Egyptian medicine had no useful intervention for most of what went wrong. What it had instead was a dense apparatus of ritual protection, and Taweret is at its centre alongside Bes.
Her image appears on:
- Amulets in faience, glass, gold and stone, in very large numbers, worn by women and placed with infants.
- Apotropaic wands of hippopotamus ivory — the material is significant, the tusk of the dangerous animal repurposed — incised with rows of protective beings and used, on the evidence of wear patterns, to trace a circle around a bed or a newborn.
- Beds, headrests and chairs, carved into the legs and supports.
- Vessels in her shape, some with a pouring hole at the nipple, which would have dispensed milk or water as a substance charged by her form. These are among the more remarkable Egyptian objects, and they make the theology entirely practical: the goddess is a container that gives you something to drink.
She also protected the mother after delivery and the child through infancy, and she is associated with nursing.
The hippopotamus problem
Male hippopotamuses were hunted, and the hunt is a royal image: the pharaoh harpooning a hippopotamus is a standard scene expressing the defeat of chaos, and in the Edfu ritual Set takes hippopotamus form to be harpooned by Horus. So Egypt simultaneously held that the hippopotamus was an emblem of disorder to be speared and that a pregnant hippopotamus goddess was the protector of mothers.
Both readings depended on sex and behaviour, and Egyptians observed both accurately. A bull hippo is aggressive and destructive. A cow hippo defends her calf with total commitment, and that is the animal Taweret is. The apparent contradiction dissolves once you notice that Egyptian religion is not classifying species, it is classifying behaviours.
The blue faience hippopotamus figurines from Middle Kingdom tombs — one of which, in the Metropolitan Museum, has become an unofficial mascot under the name William — belong to the same complex, painted with marsh plants and regarded as regenerative rather than hostile. Several were found with legs deliberately broken, apparently to prevent the animal from acting in the tomb, which suggests the ambivalence was felt.
In the sky
She has an astronomical identity. Painted star ceilings put an upright hippopotamus among the northern circumpolar figures, gripping a mooring post, stationed beside the bull's foreleg that answers roughly to the Plough. Her own stars are usually placed in Draco. Her role there appears to be to restrain the foreleg, understood as a form of Set, and keep it from escaping into the sky.
This gives her an unexpected second job: a household protective figure who is also a fixture of the circumpolar constellations, holding a chain on the northern sky. Related goddesses — Ipet, Reret and others, all hippopotamus forms — overlap with her in these contexts, and the names are used loosely enough that separating them is difficult.
Ipet at Karnak
The one substantial temple to a hippopotamus goddess is the small Ptolemaic temple of Opet at Karnak, adjoining the Khonsu temple. There she is a mother goddess associated with the birth or rebirth of Osiris, and the building is entangled with the Osirian mysteries at Thebes. It is the exception that proves the rule: for the most part these goddesses operate without institutional architecture, and where a temple appears it is late and grafted onto a larger cult.
Her Greek name, Thoueris, appears in classical sources, and Plutarch mentions a Thoueris who deserts Typhon — that is, Set — and comes over to the side of Horus, which reads as a Greek attempt to reconcile the hostile and protective hippopotamus into one narrative.
Modern
Her clearest modern appearance is in the television series Lost, whose four-toed statue was eventually revealed as a colossal Taweret — a piece of set design that sent a great many viewers to look her up, and which got the iconography broadly right while inventing everything else. She also appears in the roster of Egyptian deities used by games and by Moon Knight, generally as a friendly figure, which at least matches her function.
Questions about the hippopotamus goddess
Why does she stand on two legs when hippopotamuses do not?
Because the image needs hands and a front, and because standing upright is the posture of a person defending a doorway. Egyptian composite deities are assembled to communicate, not to be zoologically plausible: the upright stance makes her a guardian rather than an animal, the human breasts state the maternal function, and the lion's forelegs give her something to hold a knife with. The hybrid beasts hub treats this assembly-by-function logic across several traditions.
Was she worshipped by men as well?
The evidence skews heavily towards women and infants, which follows from her domain, but amulets are found in male burials too and her protective role extends to the household generally and to the dead. She appears in funerary contexts assisting rebirth, on the logic that emerging from a coffin is a kind of birth, which broadens her constituency considerably.
How many hippopotamus goddesses were there?
More than one, and the boundaries are genuinely blurred. Taweret, Ipet, Reret and Hedjet all appear, sometimes distinguished by epithet and sometimes not, and Egyptologists differ on whether these are separate goddesses, regional names for one figure, or aspects. This is normal for Egyptian deities of the domestic sphere, where there was no central theology imposing consistency, and it is a case where the honest answer is that the sources do not permit a clean count.