Taweret
The hippopotamus goddess who protected women in pregnancy and childbirth, drawn standing upright with a swollen belly, lion’s legs and a crocodile’s tail, resting a paw on the sa sign of protection. Her name means “the great one”.
Meaning
Taweret is spelled Taurt by Petrie and Ta-urt by Budge; the Greeks called her Thoueris, and some texts call her Opet. Petrie gives the meaning of her name as “the great one” and calls her “the goddess of pregnancy”. Museum amulets show her as a female hippopotamus standing on her hind legs, with the swollen belly of a pregnant animal, human arms, the legs of a lion and a crocodile’s tail down her back; one in Lisbon rests its left hand on the hieroglyph sa. Erman, writing in 1907, calls it “the hieroglyphic sign protection” and saw the point of it: by holding it she “shows what was expected of her”. The House of Netjer describes thousands of statues of her “with pendulous breasts, long pleated hair” and the horns-and-crescent headdress of Hathor, and Budge captions a picture of her “the Associate of Hathor”. The House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy) honours her today as Taweret, protector of infants and children together with Bes.
Origin and history
The hippopotamus cult is as old as Egyptian civilisation, Budge wrote, citing an archaic statue of one in red and yellow breccia in the British Museum (No. 35,700). In some theologies the hippopotamus goddess was the wife of Set; but on the whole, he judged, she was kindly, and in the last picture of the Theban Book of the Dead she is a guardian of the dead.
She belonged to the house more than the temple. In the New Kingdom, Erman found, middle-class Egyptians named their children after Bes and Thoueris and kept figures of them at home, though in the religion of the priests the two were only minor helpers of the great gods. She stood at royal births as well: in Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahari, Budge describes a relief of the queen’s birth with Bes and Taweret beside the couch, Taweret a hippopotamus on her hind legs leaning on “the emblem of magical protection”. Her amulets run from the Sixth Dynasty to Ptolemaic times in Petrie’s catalogue, flat ones first and rounded ones from the Eighteenth Dynasty, and he records them found on mummies at the diaphragm, the stomach and the feet. A green faience amulet in the National Museum of Ireland has a hole in its back for stringing it to a mummy, and its entry explains why a goddess of childbirth suited the dead: she was “appropriate to the rebirth of the dead into their afterlife”.
Why a hippopotamus?
For its power, in the readings of a museum and of the House of Netjer. The National Museum of Ireland’s entry reads her hippopotamus, lion and crocodile as “three powerful images of the voracious” joined in one body. The House of Netjer says the hippopotamus was probably not honoured for its care of its young but for “brute strength and staying power” and its ability to scare off whatever should not be there. Budge points to the other side of the animal: Ammit, the monster at the judgement of the dead, has the hindquarters of a hippopotamus.
Taweret and Bes
The two were a pair. Erman calls Taweret the wife of Bes; Budge found one or both of them in the birth rooms of Egyptian queens, and concluded that their presence mattered “both to mother and child”. A small faience amulet in the Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, has her watching over the woman at the moment of childbirth “in the company of the protective genie Bes”.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsBesA protective dwarf god with a lion’s mane and ears, a feathered crown and his tongue out, usually shown face-on. Egyptians put him in birth rooms, carved him on mirrors, cosmetic jars and pillows, and hung his amulets on children’s necklaces.
- The same shape in Adinkra symbolsBese SakaBese Saka, a bunch of kola nuts, is the adinkra symbol of affluence, abundance and unity.
See also
Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, Anubis, Geb.
Sources
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume II, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. II, pp. 285, 359
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 75–76
- Amulets, illustrated by the Egyptian collection in University College, London, W. M. Flinders Petrie, 1914, Constable and Company, London (Internet Archive), Nos. 235, 236
- The goddess Taweret (Global Egyptian Museum), Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, E.4077I, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Amulet of Taweret (Global Egyptian Museum), National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, 507.3, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Amulet of Taweret leaning on the sa sign (Global Egyptian Museum), Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, Lisbon, E 63, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Taweret (Names of Netjer), House of Netjer, “Names of Netjer” glossary, House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), Taweret
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
Added .