You don’t have to look far to find the influence of animals in ancient Egypt. Divine figures combining human bodies with the heads of a bewildering array of creatures rank among the most famous – and haunting – images to survive from antiquity. Some members of this pantheon remain well-known today, such as Anubis, the funerary god often shown with the head of a jackal, or Horus, who took the form of a falcon and became closely associated with kingship. Other deities are less familiar to modern audiences, like Khepri, who was associated with the rising sun, and was frequently shown in the guise of a scarab. Such figures are merely the tip of the pyramid when it comes to ancient Egyptian deities that were routinely shown with hybrid human and animal features. The very act of combining these elements to create divine beings speaks volumes about the importance of these creatures to ancient Egyptians. At the same time, their behaviours offered food for thought when attempting to puzzle out the workings of the cosmos. Khepri’s association with the rising sun, for example, owed much to the scarab beetle’s tendency to emerge from the earth rolling huge balls of dung.
Of course, animals were not just a source of intellectual nourishment, and their significance for all manner of everyday needs and activities is hard to overstate. These varying roles are currently being explored in the Garstang Museum of Archaeology’s Creatures of the Nile exhibition, hosted at the Victoria Gallery & Museum of the University of Liverpool (see ‘Further information’ box below). While paintings, sculpture, and amulets show the ways that ancient Egyptians could represent creatures, the materials they used can also reveal much about the ways these species were exploited. Combining this with ongoing research into how and why the range of species present in the region changed over time illustrates the complex relationship between the animal kingdom and the human ones that emerged in the Nile valley. Here, we will delve into just a few of the intriguing impacts that animals had on ancient Egypt, and vice versa.
Creature comforts
‘Animals are, of course, incredibly important to humans’, says exhibition curator Gina Criscenzo-Laycock. ‘We interact with them in many different ways, and this is particularly true of the ancient world. To take ancient Egypt and Sudan as an example, animals were used as food, beasts of burden, for companionship as pets, in war, and as raw materials. They are such a resource. Bone is very versatile: when an animal was butchered for food, the intention was to use everything; nothing would be wasted. When you aren’t manufacturing things out of, say, metal or plastic, you have to use materials that are readily available to make tools, clothing, and so on. Something you see time and again in the archaeological record is how many of the things that people were using originated from animals. So, in a practical sense, they were essential for everyday life.’
