So what's the deal with the Sha? Were they real or not? There are tons of hieroglyphs where they are described in high detail as real animals but at the same time not a single fossil of them was ever found, which is even weirder taking in consideration egyptians used to mummify animals they considered sacred.
What other egyptian mythological animals are there? I know the serpopard and the Scorpion people (forgot the name).
lol shut up I know what happened I used to be very unforgiving about this too but thankfully we have stuff that made it through
Mhm.
https://qutnyti.wordpress.com/2020/06/30/how-fake-is-roman-antiquity/
When I was young I always used to have nightmares about a monster that looked like a brown dog/donkey, so I was kinda surprised to find out that there was a fictional ancient Egyptian animal that looked exactly like that.
But personally, I think it's completely imaginary, and just the result of subliminally putting 2 scary things together. If this was a real creature, it doesn't appear to be recorded by any Levantine people.
Being recorded by other groups doesn't necessarily mean it's real either. Medieval manuscripts were full of supernatural creatures. For example, for centuries people thought dog-headed people were real living creatures, because Rome had artwork of Anubis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynocephaly
why is he holding the caduceus? Was Anubis conflated with Hermes/Mercury because he was also a psychopomp?
Exactly, yes.
Rome considered Egyptian gods to be monstrous, so that’s pretty ironic
No, they didn't. They just considered it conquered territory, and local gods were just their versions of Roman stuff.
Both Greeks and Romans didn’t like the Egyptian gods. Egyptian religious cults in particular were hated among the Roman elite. There were even temples to Egyptian gods that were built in Rome that were promptly thrown down by order of the Senate. We have multiple quotes from various authors confirming this:
>“many monsters and beasts of every sort are held by them sacred to the gods.” — On the Republic, Cicero (54 to 51 BC)
>“[Egyptians prayed to] monstrous gods of every sort” — Aeneid, Virgil (29 to 19 BC)
>“Alexandrians and Egyptians (what worse or what truer name could one apply to them?), who worship reptiles and beasts as gods, who embalm their own bodies to give them the semblance of immortality, who are most reckless in effrontery but most feeble in courage and who, worst of all, are slaves to a woman and not to a man.” — Roman History, Cassius Dio (2nd to 3rd Century AD)
Keep in mind that chriggers destroyed >99% of all Roman and Greek texts and the ones that remain to us today are the ones they found most agreed with them. And a lot of them may not even be genuine.
It definitely was not that high, we still have a lot of stuff that was preserved by the Byzantines and even the ‘barbarians’ that later settled Rome and tried their best to emulate them, its really not that surprising considering that Rome/Greece still saw Egyptians as near-easterners who they readily looked down upon and had all kinds of demeaning things to say about them beyond just religion.
>and hybrid god icons.
In Greece, yes, there were probably some built, maybe some in Rome built during its decline too but the general attitude toward them for a time is clear, the hybrid god stuff is actually pretty interesting, though it can quickly veer into schizo territory so its best I don’t touch on it
you mean the greeks, they thought the egyptian gods were the greek gods disguised as animals after Typhon yeeted them out of the Olympus
Did they? Or is that just the chrigger propaganda that remains after they burned the records they didn't like. The actual stone always seems to oddly tell a story at odds with what the israelites want everyone to believe. We know for a fact there were Egyptian temples in Greece and Rome and hybrid god icons. SOMEBODY was making them.
Prove he didnt exist.
>You can't
When I was young I had a dream about creatures called "Storm Petrels" (which is an actual bird), but they looked like giant shrews with big noses. They only lived in the old world and were rare in the new world because they inhabited old churches and ruins. It was only a few years ago I stumbled into this. They are exactly what I saw in my dream.
Is this the same animal Set is based off? I always thought he was an amalgam of shit.
Yes. I used to think he was a mule
WHO CAN IT BE NOW?
The biggest cope in modern cryptozoological discussion has to be "It is inconceivable that this animal that is clearly made up was in fact made up." It's just a mythical animal that the Egyptians thought was really cool. That's it.
fun fact: "dragon" is originally a term used in bestiaries made for large reptiles like crocodiles and pythons, but because bestiaries would often mix the real with the supernatural the term became more associated with the supernatural kind of reptiles.
Your knowledge only goes back as far as the dark ages? So this is the power of chriggery...
I mean, the word "dragon" comes from the greek "drakkon" that is just the ancient greek word for snake
This is exactly the kind of moronation I'm talking about. Assuming that ancient humans were so stupid they thought crocodiles and snakes were dragons, and that they couldn't possibly have any cool ideas. I bet one day future archaeologists will INSIST that Xenomorphs were either real or actually just wolves mistaken for insectoid killer aliens.
I think it's more like at some point someone saw a crocodile that was even bigger and scarier than usual and word of mouth spread like wildfire, always exagerating the original description. And then whoever was in charge of writing and illustrating the bestiaries took such reports as factual truth.
No, that's not how it works at all.
You have crocodile. Crocodile is scary. You have snake. Snake is scary. But the longer you are around these things, the less scary they are. Even if you see the biggest fricking crocodile of your life, they will never be as big and as scary as the one possible in your own imagination.
The only people who think that dragons or bigfoot or sea serpents were "actually" some mistaken animal that witnesses were well aware of and saw regularly are npcs with no internal world.
weren't dugongs the inspiration for the myth of mermaids though
Unlikely since they don't have dugongs in Ireland.
>No, that's not how it works at all.
no it's actually exactly how these things work. the whole takeaway from the game of telephone is that information is rarely preserved 100% in its original form as it moves from person to person. there's almost always something lost/added each time. this is just a universal social quirk with humans.
>they will never be as big and as scary as the one possible in your own imagination.
right, and so now combine that with mostly illiterate people in pre-industrial times drinking at the tavern talking about what some guy heard from some other guy that heard from some other other guy that visited a country thousands of miles away that saw some great lizard that ate animals whole. it shouldn't be hard to see how exaggerated things could get
Some of the very earliest recorded uses of the Greek "drakon" refer to large constricting snakes from Africa and Asia. The modern meaning of the word evolved from that definition. They didn't think "snakes were dragons"; in their language, the word dragon just meant big snake. I'm sorry you had to find out this way.
damn Cadmus is surprisingly hung for greek art standards there
>Assuming that ancient humans were so stupid they thought crocodiles and snakes were dragons, and that they couldn't possibly have any cool ideas.
That's not what anon said.
>modern cryptozoological discussion
So online comment sections?
>"It is inconceivable that this animal that is clearly made up was in fact made up."
>Okapi are muh native superstition
>Forest elephants are muh native superstition
>Gorillas are muh native superstition
When will ~~*naturalists*~~ learn?
The Was scepter is a martian and this mutant and Set are both based on the Was. I will be taking no questions.
it was just the ancient egyptians being high as frick on some funny desert plant they werent able to comprehend, same as all other entities
That's a dog
It's actually an aardvark relative that evolved to fuction like a dog. Like the tasmanian tiger.
So you’re saying we could have had an ant eating dog?? Kinda cool…
Big if true
That's the facial profile of a sighthound you dip.
Behold, an Aardvark.