Monsters in Ancient Egyptian Art

This is an overview of one of the most peculiar natural history conceptions of the ancient Egyptians: the belief in monsters. Mythical marvels first emerge in iconography during predynastic times and can be documented down through the Graeco-Roman Period and beyond. For the residents of the Nile Valley, these extraordinary oddities were judged to be just as real as any other regular living wildlife species, if only more mysterious and dangerous. In fact, these unnatural creations are occasionally executed in art, mingling right along with the standard desert game animals in hunting scenes, especially in the Middle Kingdom tomb-chapels. Lest we should forget, Western made maps of Africa, as recently as just four or five centuries ago, represented the immense interior of the continent as inhabited by fearsome dragons and other malicious beings. In the absence of fact, these represented the unknown and the unexplored
How is the truly monstrous in Egyptian art to be defined? For our purposes, it does not include the pantheon of deities and minor demons which were routinely portrayed as having the body of a human being, but shown with the head of some sort of animal, bird or even an insect. These are composite figures which have a definite logic to them, where the head becomes the critical element of the figure, while the body is reduced to a secondary importance. They can accordingly be read, in the manner of a hieroglyphic sign. So a falcon-headed god is a falcon-god pictured in human form. Precisely the reverse holds true too. Thus, when a king or queen assumes the appearance of a lion, it will still retain the human head of the individual portrayed, while the body displays the characteristics of a lion