Set

Set’s symbol is the Set animal, a beast with a head like a donkey’s or a camel’s, pricked ears and a forked, upright tail, which has never been identified. He was the Egyptian god of the desert and disorder, the murderer of Osiris in the later myth, and also the god who beat the serpent Apep each night for the sun.

Egyptian gods and their symbols. Also called set animal, set egyptian god, seth, seth egyptian god, set symbol, set symbols, symbol of set.

Meaning

Set, also written Seth, was the son of Geb and Nut, the brother of Osiris and Isis and the husband of Nephthys. The Global Egyptian Museum calls him the god of chaos and confusion, and gives him everything outside the Nile valley, the desert and foreign lands. He is usually drawn with a man’s body and the head of a mythical animal that sometimes looks like a donkey or an anteater; as a whole animal he has a predator’s body and a forked, upstanding tail, and he could also take the form of a hippopotamus or a pig. Wallis Budge, writing in 1904, describes the head as something like a camel’s with pricked ears and says that the animal “has not yet been identified”; his idea that it was hunted to extinction he offered, by his own account, “in the absence of any facts”. Red was his colour in Egyptian painting, the colour of danger, anger and the desert. Plutarch reports that the Egyptians believed Typhon, the Greek name for Set, had red hair and the colour of an ass, and that they held the ass unclean for its likeness to him; he gives Set’s Egyptian names as Seth, Bebon and Smu.

Origin and history

Set was worshipped long before he was a villain. He appears on all kinds of objects from prehistoric times, the Global Egyptian Museum says, at Naqada, where tradition said he was born, and throughout Egypt. In the Pyramid Texts, Budge points out, he is a friend and helper of the dead: Horus and Set take the dead king by the hand and lead him up the ladder to heaven, and “when he standeth up he is Horus, and when he sitteth down he is Set”. Plutarch has him born on the third of the five days added to the year, “not in due season or manner”, breaking out through his mother’s side.

The murder of Osiris comes later in the record: the museum dates the first evidence of Set as the killer to the Middle Kingdom. In Plutarch he measures his brother for the fatal chest and later, hunting by moonlight, finds the body and cuts it up. He then fought Horus for the throne. He tore out Horus’s eye, and Horus tried to spear him when he turned into a hippopotamus, until the divine tribunal decided for Horus. Budge reads the title of Thoth, who parted them, as “Judge of the two opponent gods”. In the version on the Shabaka stone, Geb first split Egypt between them, Upper Egypt to Set and Lower Egypt to Horus, then regretted it and gave the whole country to Horus.

Was Set evil?

Not to begin with, and never only that. The Global Egyptian Museum says that, like most gods, he had a positive side: every night he beat the serpent Apep, the sun god’s archenemy. Every king came to embody Horus and Set together, and the two were carved on the sides of royal thrones joining the two lands; Budge describes reliefs of Horus and Set pouring life over Seti I and setting the double crown on Ramesses II. In the 2nd Dynasty Set sometimes took Horus’s place on top of the king’s serekh. The Hyksos worshipped him in the Delta, probably as their own Baal, and early Ramesside kings were named after him, Sethos (Seti) I among them. The darker reading grew up beside this. Plutarch gives him the ass, the crocodile and the hippopotamus as his animals, and Budge called him, “from a moral point of view”, “the personification of sin and evil”.

The Set animal on the was sceptre

The Victoria and Albert Museum identifies the head on its great faience was sceptre of Amenhotep II (437-1895) as “the head of the animal of the God Seth”, and elsewhere on the same page says that the head “probably” is Set. Flinders Petrie found it in pieces in 1894 in the temple of Seth at Naqada. The Global Egyptian Museum describes the sceptre’s head only as a stylised animal.

Sources

Seth, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Seth
Osiris, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Osiris
Serekh, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Serekh
Colours, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Colours
Geb, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Geb
The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume II, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. II, ch. XV, Set and Nephthys, pp. 241–244
Isis and Osiris, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), §§ 12–13, 18
Isis and Osiris, §§ 30–31, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), §§ 30–31
Isis and Osiris, § 50, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), § 50
Isis and Osiris, § 62, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), § 62
Sceptre (Uas), Victoria and Albert Museum, museum no. 437-1895, Victoria and Albert Museum, Physical description; object history
Dictionary.com: Set, Dictionary.com, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Dictionary.com
Was-sceptre, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Was-sceptre

The same shape elsewhere

Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research

Added October 10, 2026.

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