Why Do Ancient Egyptian Gods Have Animal Heads???

Modern people have often found ancient Egyptian depictions of their gods perplexing and strange, since many of them bear the heads or other features of animals. If you’ve ever wondered why the Egyptians did this, you’re certainly not the first. Even in ancient times, Greek, Roman, and early Christian writers mocked their Egyptian contemporaries for their animal-headed gods (even while some Greeks and Romans adopted them). Later, nineteenth and early twentieth-century western writers claimed the Egyptians’ animal-headed gods as evidence of their culture’s supposed primitivity and inferiority to Greece and Rome.

In reality, Egypt is far from the only ancient culture in which people depicted deities with mixed human and animal features. Therianthropomorphic (i.e., human-animal hybrid) deities are fairly common in the ancient Middle East, North Africa, and southern Europe, including even in ancient Greece and Rome. The Egyptians were no strangers to fully anthropomorphic deities either. By exploring the context and history of Egypt’s animal-headed deities, this post will show that, far from indicating lack of cultural sophistication, they actually display ancient Egypt’s creativity and cultural dynamism.

Therianthropomorphic deities beyond Egypt

First, let’s dispel the notion that the Egyptian habit of depicting gods with animal features was in any way unique. Human-animal hybrid deities show up regularly across ancient cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. In fact, human-animal hybrid figures, who may or may not represent divine beings of some kind, appear in some of the oldest known examples of figurative art.

As I discuss in this blog post I wrote in April 2022 about the oldest surviving evidence for deities in human cultures, one of the oldest surviving works of figurative art known from anywhere on earth is the Löwenmensch or “Lion-Human” of Hohlenstein-Stadel, a statuette carved from mammoth ivory dating to between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago during the early Aurignacian culture of the very early Upper Paleolithic. The statuette dates to a time when there might still have been some living Neanderthals in Europe alongside Homo sapiens.

Twentieth-century archaeologists discovered the Löwenmensch in the cave Hohlenstein-Stadel in the Swabian Jura in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It depicts a being with the body of a human and the head of a lion. No one knows what the statuette’s original purpose was or what the figure’s identity or significance might be. The lion-headed figure might represent a deity, an ancestor, a magician or shaman, a legendary hero, a monster, a creature someone saw in a dream, or some combination of more than one of these.

ABOVE: Photographs from Wikimedia Commons showing the “Löwenmensch of Hohlenstein-Stadel” from the front and from the back

If we jump ahead over twenty thousand years later, other early depictions of human-animal hybrid beings appear in the paintings and carvings from the Cave of the Trois-Frères in southern France, which date to the Magdalenian culture (lasted c. 17,000 – c. 12,000 years ago).

In a cavern deep inside the cave known as the “Sanctuary” a painting appears of a being with the legs, feet, and hands of a human being, but the rear, tail, penis, and testicles of a horse, and other possible animal features. (The original documenter of the painting, a French Catholic priest named Henri Breuil, unfortunately seems to have embellished his published illustration of the figure with features that don’t appear in any modern photographs of the painting.)

ABOVE: Modern photograph of the “Sorcerer” cave painting (left) and illustration of the cave painting by Henri Breuil originally published in 1930 in the book Un dessin de la grotte des Trois frères (right)

In a lower scene in the same cavern, another figure appears behind a group of bison standing upright with the feet, legs, and penis of a human, but the upper body of a bison, lifting his left leg as though dancing while holding a flute-like musical instrument to his mouth with his cloven hooves. This figure has been labeled “the Dancing Shaman.”

ABOVE: Illustration by Henri Breuil, originally published in 1930 in the book Un dessin de la grotte des Trois frères, depicting the so-called “Dancing Shaman” of the Cave of the Trois-Frères

The examples above demonstrate that artistic depictions of therianthropomorphic figures, if not therianthropomorphic deities, are extremely ancient and predate both human civilization and the invention of writing by literally tens of thousands of years.

If we fast-forward over ten thousand years later, the Mesopotamians in early historical times usually depicted and described their major deities as being fully or mostly anthropomorphic, but, in some cases, they did portray them with bird-like wings extending from their backs, as shown in the third-millennium BCE Akkadian cylinder seal depiction of the warrior goddess Inanna/Ishtar below.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikipedia Commons showing a clay impression from an Akkadian cylinder seal dating to between c. 2330 and c. 2150 BCE, depicting the warrior goddess Ishtar with bird wings holding a lion on a leash

Meanwhile, lesser deities and demons are commonly depicted with more extensive hybrid human and animal features. For instance, the female demon Lamashtu is usually depicted as a hairy, naked woman with the head of a lion and the teeth or body of a donkey, often clutching a snake in either hand while a dog and a pig suckle at her breasts.

Lamashu’s nemesis, the male demon Pazuzu, is depicted as a man with the head of a dog, a scaly body, the wings and talons of a bird, and a tail or penis with the head of a snake. Ancient Mesopotamians often depicted Pazuzu on amulets and called on him to drive away Lamashtu.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of the lower register of a Neo-Assyrian bronze protection plaque dating to between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE, currently held in the Louvre Museum, depicting the male demon Pazuzu (left) chasing away the female demon Lamashtu (center)

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of an Assyrian bronze amulet dating to the early first millennium BCE, currently held in the Louvre Museum, depicting the demon Pazuzu

Various other Mesopotamian protective spirits often have mixed human and animal forms. The ancient Mesopotamians believed that demons lurked in latrines and attacked hapless victims who went inside to urinate or defecate. One such demon was known as Šulak and is described in Akkadian textual sources as appearing like a lion walking on its hind legs.

To protect against these demons, ancient Mesopotamians often placed images of Urmaḫlullu, a guardian spirit with the head, arms, and upper body of a man and the lower body and four legs of a lion, near the entrances of latrines or places of urination and defecation. One exquisite wall relief dating to around 640 BCE that was displayed near the entrance of the latrine of the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh depicts a series of animal-headed guardian spirits in the upper register and an image of Urmaḫlullu in the lower register.

ABOVE: Photo of a relief carving of various animal-headed protected spirits (upper register) and the lion-centaur Urmaḫlullu (bottom register) from outside the lavatory of the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, dating to around 640 BCE

In the Hebrew Bible, the Israelite and Judahite national god Yahweh is usually described as appearing in anthropomorphic form (as, for instance, in his appearance to Abraham by the Oaks of Mamre in Genesis 18). Several passages, however, mention people worshipping him in the form of a bull (or at least through the association of bull imagery).

For instance, in Exodus 32, while Moses is on Mount Sinai, the Israelites under Aaron’s supervision create a cult statue of a calf made of gold and declare it to represent Yahweh, saying “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Exodus 32:4, NJPS). In 1 Kings 12:26–30, Jeroboam, after establishing the breakaway northern kingdom of Israel, sets up golden calves at Bethel and Dan, also apparently meant to represent Yahweh.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of a bronze bull statuette discovered at an open-air sanctuary in Samaria dating to the twelfth century BCE

Although most Greek and Roman deities are both described in texts and depicted in art as fully anthropomorphic and ideally beautiful, some deities, particularly those associated with nature and the predominantly rural region of Arkadia in the central Peloponnesos, defy this trend. The most prominent example is Pan, a god associated with wild nature and shepherds who was originally worshipped in Arkadia and whose worship spread to Athens after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE.

One of the earliest surviving artistic depictions of Pan is an Attic red-figure bell-krater by the Pan Painter dating to around 470 BCE, currently held in the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, which depicts him as a naked man with the legs and full head of a goat lustfully pursuing a fleeing shepherd. From the fourth century BCE onward, Pan’s image in Greek art becomes standardized with him having the upper body of a man and the legs and horns of a goat.

ABOVE: Photo I took myself of an Attic red-figure bell-krater by the Pan Painter dating c. 470 BCE, currently held in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, depicting Pan with the full head of a goat chasing after a fleeing shepherd

Meanwhile, satyrs (male nature spirits in Greek religion who are often companions of Dionysos, the god of wine) are depicted in the Archaic and Classical Periods as comically ugly men with the tails and ears of horses as well as large, permanently erect penises. Later, from the later fourth century BCE onward, satyrs are depicted with the legs and horns of goats in a manner similar to Pan; this portrayal carries over into Roman and later art.

ABOVE: Photo I took myself of the tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix painted by Epiktetos between c. 510 and c. 500 BCE, currently held in the MFA in Boston, depicting a drunk, ithyphallic satyr with the ears and tail of a horse holding a drinking horn while balancing on an inflated wineskin

Even Greek deities who are usually described and depicted anthropomorphically could also take the forms of animals. For instance, in myth, Zeus repeatedly takes the forms of various animals and animal-human hybrids in order to abduct and/or rape various mortals. For instance, he is said to have abducted the Phoinikian princess Europe in the form of a bull, abducted the Trojan prince Ganymedes in the form of an eagle, raped the nymph Antiope in the form of a satyr, and raped King Tyndareus of Sparta’s wife Leda in the form of a swan.

The Arkadians worshipped Zeus under the epithet Λύκαιος (Lýkaios) or “Wolfish” in association with the Lykaia, a secretive nocturnal festival that took place on Mount Lykaion. As I discuss at greater length in this post I wrote in October 2021 about the ancient origins of horror monsters, some ancient authors claimed that this festival involved a human sacrifice and cannibalism and that some of the men who attended it would turn into wolves for a period of nine years. Meanwhile, in Archaic poetry, Zeus’s wife Hera bears the frequent and very unusual epithet βοῶπις (boôpis), meaning “cow-eyed.”

The ancient Greek travel writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE) in his Guide to Greece 8.25.5 records a local myth associated with the town of Thelpousa in Arkadia that, when Demeter was mourning over Hades’s abduction of Persephone, Poseidon saw her and lusted after her. She turned into a mare to escape him, but he turned into a stallion and raped her.

Pausanias attests that sanctuaries to Poseidon as a horse existed in Arkadia near the city Mantineia (8.10.2) and in Methydrion (8.36.2) while altars to him in his horse form stood in the sanctuary of Despoina near Lykosoura (8.37.10). He also records that, in a cave of Mount Elaios, the inhabitants of the Arkadian town of Phigalia had set up a wooden cult statue of Demeter, which depicted her as a woman with the head and mane of a horse (8.42.4).

The Etruscans, an ancient people who inhabited northern Italy and spoke a non-Indo-European language, imagined various gods and divine beings as blending human and animal attributes. Notably, the major Etruscan god Voltumna or Veltha, who was associated with vegetation, agriculture, and war and whom the Romans called Vertumnus, was known for frequently changing their shape (and gender) at will, appearing in a wide variety of human and sometimes animal forms.

An Etruscan black-figure plate discovered at Vulci dated between c. 540 and c. 510 BCE, currently held in the National Etruscan Museum in the Villa Giulia in Rome, depicts a fur-covered figure with the body of a man and the head of a wolf, who appears to be kneeling, running, or maybe dancing on his hind legs like a human. The identity and significance of this wolf-man is currently unknown.

ABOVE: Detail of the Etruscan black-figure plate dating to between c. 540 and c. 510 BCE depicting a wolf-man

A badly-damaged fresco from the Tomb of Orcus or Tomba dell’Orco, chamber II, at Tarquinia, dating to between c. 325 and c. 300 BCE, depicts the Etruscan underworld deity Tuchulcha: a terrifying, demonic being with wild hair, donkey-like pointed ears, a vulture-like beak, and enormous bird-like wings. Two snakes sprout from the top of their head and their left arm is outstretched with a snake coiled around it.

Tuchulcha also displays an unusual blend of masculine and feminine features, having a full beard that covers most of their lower face, an exaggeratedly prominent brow ridge, and thick, beefy arms, but also woman-like breasts and pale skin (a distinguishing feature of women in Etruscan art) while wearing a woman’s chiton.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of the fresco of Tuchulcha and These (Theseus) from the Tomba dell’Orco, chamber II, at Tarquinia

The Celtic peoples of western Europe worshipped a god whose name is attested in a single inscription on the first-century CE Pillar of the Boatmen from Roman Lutetia (Paris) as “Cernunnos” and who is represented in Celtic art as an antlered man who is usually seated cross-legged on the ground. Artistic depictions associate him with torcs (which he is usually either wearing or holding) and surrounded by wild animals, especially ram-horned snakes and deer. In some depictions, he holds a coin purse, a cornucopia, or a basket of fruit.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of an altar from Reims, France, dating to the first century CE, now held in the Musée Saint-Remi, depicting the Celtic god Cernunnos (center) sitting cross-legged with antlers rising from his head, a torc around his neck, and two deer by his feet, between the Roman gods Apollo (left) and Mercurius (right)

Roots of human-animal hybrid deities in Egyptian prehistory

As the examples I have cited above demonstrate, many ancient peoples depicted deities with animal features—not just the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians are, however, unusual in the fact that they usually depicted most of their major deities (as opposed to just some major deities or only minor deities) this way. This is most likely connected to the social and sacred significance of animals rooted deeply in Egypt’s prehistory.

The prehistoric Egyptians of the fifth millennium BCE were nomadic cattle herders. Rock art from wadi sites in the Eastern Desert, particularly the site of Wadi Umm Salam, dating to this period, depict mostly scenes of animals, especially cattle and wild savannah animals (Lankester 2016). Some of the animals appearing in these scenes may represent divine or sacred beings of some kind.

The earliest probable surviving depictions of recognizable Egyptian deities portray them in fully or mostly animal forms. The obverse (front side) of the Narmer Palette, which dates to around the thirty-first century BCE and celebrates the unification of Egypt by the pharaoh Narmer, depicts Narmer clutching one of his defeated enemies by the hair and raising a club in preparation to smite him while the god Horus in the form of a falcon sits perched atop a papyrus plant, reaching out with a human arm to lift the head of a defeated enemy. (Hit tip to u/Pami_the_Younger on Reddit for pointing out the falcon’s human arm, which I initially missed.) Two cow heads, possibly representing the goddess Hathor, adorn the top of the palette.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the obverse of the Narmer Palette

Understanding gods and animals in Egyptian art

The archaeological and historical evidence does not directly tell us why the Egyptians envisioned their gods this way, but it is easy to draw inferences. The gods are, fundamentally, inhuman supernatural beings residing in nature, so, from a certain perspective, it makes sense to depict them either as animals or with features of animals to convey that they are fundamentally different from humans.

Many ancient peoples, including the Egyptians, imagined deities as residing in or frequenting some kind of realm in the sky. The only animals that humans typically see in the sky are birds, so it is no surprise that many ancient peoples, including the Egyptians, especially associated birds with the divine. This association is particularly strong in the case of swift, powerful birds of prey, such as eagles, owls, falcons, and kites.

In this context, it is easy to understand why the Egyptians depicted so many deities either as birds of prey, humans with the heads of birds of prey, or humans with bird wings. For instance, they usually represented Horus (a god associated with the sky and kingship), Ra (the sun god), and Khonsu (the moon god) either as falcons or as men with the heads of falcons.

The goddess Isis (the mother of Horus and wife of Osiris) appears in Egyptian art in different forms: as a kite, a woman with the wings of a kite, a woman with bull horns similar to the goddess Hathor, or fully a human woman with no animal features whatsoever.

ABOVE: Painting from the Tomb of Sennedjem, dating to around the thirteenth century BCE, depicting the goddesses Isis (left) and Nephthys (right) as kites watching over the mummy of the deceased

ABOVE: Wall painting from the Tomb of Seti I (KV 17) depicting Isis as a woman with kite wings

ABOVE: Painting from the Tomb of Nakhtamun (Theban Tomb 335), dating to the thirtenh century BCE, depicting Isis (left) and Nephthys (right) as fully anthropomorphic goddesses with no animal features, standing by while Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, prepares the deceased’s mummy for burial

The Egyptians also depicted certain deities as animals or with features of animals in order to emphasize those deities’ particular domains. For instance, they depicted Hathor (a maternal goddess associated with love, music, dancing, sexuality, and the joys of life) as either a cow or a woman with cow horns, because the early Egyptians raised cattle for livestock and food and therefore associated cows with prosperity and the sustenance of life. Meanwhile, they depicted Anubis (the god of death) as either a jackal or a man with the head of a jackal, because jackals are scavengers who often dug up corpses from shallow graves.

Hellenistic and Roman-Era syncretism

From the fourth century BCE onward, Egyptian and Greek cultures came into closer contact. As I discuss in this post from January 2023, the Egyptian god Amun was introduced to the Greek world by the late fifth century BCE under the Greek name Ἄμμων (Ámmōn). Sometime around the middle of the fourth century BCE, the Egyptian goddess Isis was introduced to the Greek world as well.

The earliest evidence of Isis’s worship in Greece is a large, inscribed stele discovered in the Athenian port of Peiraieus and dated 333/332 BCE. The inscription primarily records that a trade association of resident Kitians petitioned the Athenian assembly for a grant of enktesis (i.e., the right to own real property) in order to build a temple to “Aphrodite” (who was identified with the Phoenician goddess ʿAshtart) in the Peiraieus and that the assembly granted their request. It also, however, mentions in passing that the assembly had previously made a grant of enktesis for Egyptians resident in the city to establish a sanctuary of Isis.

The conquests of King Alexandros III of Makedonia (ruled 336 – 323 BCE) brought most of the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt, under Greek cultural hegemony and inaugurated a historical epoch lasting roughly three centuries known as the Hellenistic Period. During this period, the cult of Isis became widespread throughout the Greek-dominated eastern Mediterranean.

The Romans also adopted Isis and built sanctuaries to her throughout their empire. The Roman city of Pompeii, for instance, housed a Temple of Isis, which was one of the first structures that the early excavators of the city unearthed back in the 1760s. The North African Latin writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – after c. 170 CE) features the mystery cult of Isis prominently in his novel The Golden Ass.

The Greeks and Romans identified Isis and iconographically conflated her with several of their native goddesses, including Demeter/Ceres, Persephone/Proserpina, and Tykhe/Fortuna. In Greco-Roman depictions, Isis is typically a fully anthropomorphic woman who wears a shawl tied in a large knot over her breast and is often holding a sistrum (a musical instrument associated with her cult) and/or a situla (a water pitcher). She often wears a headdress or tiara featuring either the solar disk or the lunar crescent.

The Greeks and Romans revered Isis as a protectress of sailors and sometimes depicted her holding a ship’s rudder. They sometimes also depicted her nursing her son Harpokrates (the infant Horus). Although some Egyptian depictions of Isis dating to the Hellenistic and Roman Periods retain the kite wings from her older iconography, Greek and Roman depictions generally dispense with them altogether.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis in fully anthropomorphic form dating between c. 117 and c. 138 CE with seventeenth-century restorations, found at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, now held in the Capitoline Museums in Rome

At the same time, however, the Greeks and Romans also retained the animal iconography for some Egyptian deities whom they adopted. The most notable example of this is the god Anubis, whom the Greeks identified with their god Hermes (who was believed to guide the souls of the dead to the underworld as a psychopomp) and the Romans with their god Mercurius (whom they also equated with the Greek Hermes).

Greek and Roman depictions of Hermes-Anubis often show him in a naturalistic Greco-Roman style wearing a Greek-style chlamys and holding a kerykeion (a winged staff with two snakes entwined around it that was associated with Hermes), but yet also having the head of a jackal. A full-sized marble statue of Hermes-Anubis in this form, currently held in the Vatican Museums in Rome, often shocks visitors for its incongruous blend of Greco-Roman and Egyptian iconographic elements.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a full-sized marble statue of the Egyptian god Anubis with the head of a jackal depicted in a naturalistic Greco-Roman style, holding a kerykeion identifying him with the Greco-Roman god Hermes/Mercurius, dating between c. 100 and c. 138 CE, from the city of Rome, currently held in the Vatican Museums

Ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian commentary on Egyptian deities

It is in the context of this widespread adoption, adaptation, and syncretism that we must place Greek, Roman, and early Christian commentary on the Egyptian deities.

The Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE), who wrote in the Greek language, wrote a satirical dialogue The Gods in Council, in which he imagines what it might be like if all the deities from all the different nations of the earth met together for a council meeting. Zeus, as the king of all the deities, presides over the council while, Momos, the god of satire, pokes fun at all the various attendees. When Momos gets around to the Egyptian deities, he mocks them as half-animal monstrosities—not real deities at all:

Momos: “But I should just like to ask that Egyptian there—the dog-faced gentleman in the linen suit—who he is, and whether he proposes to establish his divinity by barking? And will the piebald bull yonder, from Memphis, explain what use he has for a temple, an oracle, or a priest? As for the ibises and monkeys and goats and worse absurdities that are bundled in upon us, goodness knows how, from Egypt, I am ashamed to speak of them; nor do I understand how you, gentlemen, can endure to see such creatures enjoying a prestige equal to or greater than your own.—And you yourself, sir, must surely find ram’s horns a great inconvenience?”

Zeus: “Certainly, it is disgraceful the way these Egyptians go on. At the same time, Momos, there is an occult significance in most of these things; and it ill becomes you, who are not of the initiated, to ridicule them.”

Momos: “Oh, come now: a god is one thing, and a person with a dog’s head is another; I need no initiation to tell me that.”

Zeus: “Well, that will do for the Egyptians; time must be taken for the consideration of their case. Proceed to others.”

Early Christians took a similarly dim view of Egyptian religious practices. For instance, the Greek Christian writer Klemes (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE), who lived and taught in the city of Alexandria for most of his life, writes with disgust in his Paidogogos 3.2 about how the Egyptians decorate the outsides of their temples with the most stunning and expensive adornments imaginable—and yet, inside those temples, they worship images of base animals representing false gods. He writes, as translated by William Wilson:

“But those women who beautify the outside, are unawares all waste in the inner depths, as is the case with the ornaments of the Egyptians; among whom temples with their porticos and vestibules are carefully constructed, and groves and sacred fields adjoining; the halls are surrounded with many pillars; and the walls gleam with foreign stones, and there is no want of artistic painting; and the temples gleam with gold, and silver, and amber, and glitter with parti-colored gems from India and Ethiopia; and the shrines are veiled with gold-embroidered hangings.”

“But if you enter the penetralia of the enclosure, and, in haste to behold something better, seek the image that is the inhabitant of the temple, and if any priest of those that offer sacrifice there, looking gave, and singing a pæan in the Egyptian tongue, remove a little of the veil to show the god, he will give you a hearty laugh at the object of worship. For the deity that is sought, to whom you have rushed, will not be found within, but a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent of the country, or some such beast unworthy of the temple, but quite worthy of a den, a hole, or the dirt. The god of the Egyptians appears a beast rolling on a purple couch.”

Are therianthropomorphic deities really more “primitive” than anthropomorphic ones?

Following the publication of Charles Darwin’s monograph On the Origin of Species in 1859, prominent late nineteenth and early twentieth-century theorists and anthropologists, such as the Swiss legal scholar and philologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (lived 1815 – 1887), the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (lived 1832 – 1917), and the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (lived 1854 – 1941), came to regard human cultures and religions as following a linear, evolutionary progression from earlier, more “primitive” stages to more modern, developed stages.

Edith Hamilton’s introduction to her bestselling book Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, which—despite having been originally published in 1942—is still widely read and often assigned as reading for high school literature or myth classes, draws on theories of this kind when she claims that the ancient Greeks were the first people ever to worship anthropomorphic deities and presents this as evidence of the ancient Greeks’ greater cultural sophistication over the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. She writes (on page 16 of the 1969 Mentor Book edition):

“The Greeks made their gods in their own image. That had not entered the mind of man before. Until then, gods had no semblance of reality. They were unlike all living things. In Egypt, a towering colossus, immobile, beyond the power of the imagination to endow with movement, as fixed in stone as the tremendous temple columns, a representation of the human shape deliberately made unhuman. Or a rigid figure, a woman with a cat’s head suggesting inflexible, inhuman cruelty. Or a monstrous mysterious sphinx, aloof from all that lives. In Mesopotamia, bas-reliefs of bestial shapes unlike any beast ever known, men with birds’ heads and lions with bulls’ heads and both with eagles’ wings, creations of artists who were intent upon producing something never seen except in their own minds, the very consummation of unreality.”

“These and their like were what the pre-Greek world worshipped. One need only place beside them in imagination any Greek statue of a god, so normal and natural with all its beauty, to perceive what a new idea had come into the world. With its coming, the universe became rational.”

As we have already seen, Hamilton’s claims in this passage are mostly factually incorrect. The peoples of the ancient Near East, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians in Mesopotamia, venerated fully anthropomorphic deities millennia before the Greeks; they venerated therianthropomorphic deities as well, but fully anthropomorphic deities were more common.

The Egyptians also worshipped some deities who are usually depicted in fully anthropomorphic form, such as Osiris, as well as others who sometimes appear in anthropomorphic forms in pre-Hellenistic Egyptian art, such as Isis and Nephthys above. Meanwhile, the Greeks believed in an array of therianthropomorphic deities and nature spirits themselves.

Present-day ancient historians and historians and religion overwhelmingly reject the equation of therianthropomorphic deities with irrational primitivity and anthropomorphic deities with rational civilization, because it is overly simplistic, it ignores the diversity that exists both within and between human cultures, and it serves to justify western imperialism by imposing a chauvinistic hierarchy of cultures with modern western cultures at the top. Nonetheless, this linear, evolutionary way of thinking about the history of religion continues to influence popular understandings of anthropology, religion, and myth.

Because hybrid deities are more visibly associated with cultures that the modern west regards as non-western and anthropomorphic deities are more visibly associated with cultures that the modern west regards as its precursors such as the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Germanic peoples, authors influenced by the linear evolutionary model of cultural history have tended to regard cultures that worship deities with animal features as more “primitive” and cultures that worship anthropomorphic deities as more civilized—but there is no inherent reason why we should regard this as the case.

While it is true that anthropomorphic deities generally seem more relatable and humanlike than deities with animal features, relatability and resemblance to humans are not universally desired features for deities across all cultures. On the contrary, some cultures may regard it as preferable to emphasize the gods’ inhumanity and Otherness. The western cultural preference for deities who resemble humans is simply that: a cultural preference.

In fact, one could argue that, far from being a sign of primitivity and lack of sophistication, therianthropomorphism allows a greater diversity and complexity of ways of imagining and depicting deities than anthropomorphism does. If a certain culture’s gods all look like idealized humans, this produces a certain homogeneity and limits the ways in which the culture can make certain gods iconographically distinctive.

(This blog post is an expansion of this answer I originally wrote in response to a question in r/AskHistorians.)

Works cited

• Lankester, Francis David. 2016. “Predynastic Egyptian rock art as evidence for early elites’ rite of passage.” Afrique: Archéologie & Arts [En ligne], 12. http://journals.openedition.org/aaa/920.