CROCODILUS NILOTICUS. 25 
Sir J. G. Wilkinson l also held that the reverence paid to the crocodile and to certain 
fish had nothing whatever to do with religion originally, but had been instituted by 
authority for the reason suggested by De Pauw. 
Whatever may have been the origin of the cult, the crocodile, in certain localities, 
was sacred to and the emblem of Sebek, the water-god, who caused the Nile to rise. 
In other places it was the symbol of impurity and an emblem of Typhon, and was 
ruthlessly destroyed. 
Under the new Empire, Sebek ultimately became identified with the God " Ra," and 
in the Fayum he was represented, in human form, with the head of a crocodile, horns, 
sun-disc, and feathers. The simplicity of the original religion became obscured by 
fanciful speculations ; but, at the same time, the tendency seems to have been towards 
a monotheism rich in individualized attributes. 
As the impersonification of evil, the crocodile is not unfrequently represented in cippi 
as under the feet of Horus, the avenger of Osiris. In a cippus of this nature in 
the possession of Professor Petrie, and probably not older than the XlXth Dynasty, 
Horus stands on two crocodiles, holding a lion by the tail and two serpents in his left 
hand, and an oryx by its horns in his right hand. A quiver of arrows is across his 
shoulders. Over the head of the deity are the wings and disc, but no serpent, simply 
indicating the protection of the Sun. The lion and the serpent were both forms 
typical of Typhon, while the oryx likewise, according to Champollion, was also 
emblematical of the evil principle. In remarkable contrast to this is the elaborate 
cippus of Ptolemaic date figured by Wilkinson 2 . 
The hippopotamus, which had much the same distribution in the Nile in former 
times as the crocodile, and only disappeared from the delta towards the end of the 
17th century 3 , was also an emblem of Typhon, and worshipped at Papremis i (Chois) 
in the delta. In the papyri and on the monuments there are curious figures made up of 
these two animals, as, for example, in the papyrus of Ani, to take a single illustration 
among many others, in which a crocodile's head takes the place of that of a hippo- 
potamus, the fore quarters of the latter becoming those of a leopard ; but many other 
complex figures are met with. The hippopotamus itself, sitting erect on its hind- 
quarters, with pendulous human-like mammae, represents the Goddess Thueris, in 
Egyptian Ta-urt, or " the Great," said to be the concubine of Typhon ; and figures of 
this nature are met with, having a crocodile, the male personification of evil, clinging 
on to her back. 
Professor Petrie has recently published some most important results attained by 
him at Koptos 5 , and I have to thank him for having permitted me to examine the two 
earliest figures extant of the crocodile, modelled in Nile clay. They were discovered 
1 Bawlinson's Herod, ii. 1880, p. 76, note 5. 2 The ADcient Egyptians, iii. pi. xssiii. 
3 Maillet, op. cit. p. 31 *. i Herod, ii. 71. 
5 Koptos, 1896. 
