Sobek

Budge believed the crocodile was first worshipped out of “abject fear”, as a beast that wandered the fields when the canals dried and killed whatever came in its way, but that by the end of the Sixth Dynasty Sobek had been identified with the sun god Ra, and that he was “a god who was good to the dead”, helping them to rise as he had helped the young Horus to his father’s throne.

Herodotus found Egypt divided over the animal. “Some of the Egyptians consider crocodiles sacred; others do not, but treat them as enemies.” Near Thebes and Lake Moeris each household raised a tame crocodile with “ornaments of glass and gold on its ears and bracelets on its forefeet”, and when it died it was embalmed and buried in a sacred coffin; around Elephantine crocodiles were eaten. The Egyptians, he adds, called them khampsae. Not everything he says holds: his crocodile has no tongue, which Budge calls “an error which was wide-spread in ancient times”. The geographer Strabo, quoted by Budge, visited Crocodilopolis, then called Arsinoe, where the sacred crocodile was kept by itself in a lake and was “fed with bread, flesh, and wine” that visitors brought, the priests opening its jaws to put the food in. Erman records the same custom from Herodotus: at Lake Moeris he was shown a sacred crocodile whose ears and forefeet were decorated with gold and precious stones. In the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria is a mummified crocodile on a wooden stretcher, which in the second century BC would have been carried through the village in procession.