ie 
Lesley.] 456 [April 5 
There is nothing peculiar about the animal except his ears and tail. He 
is evidently a jackal, fox or dog. But his ears are very long, stiff and 
straight in the air, diverging; and his rod-like tail is forked, at the end. 
He is usually called a grifin; by some a girajfe. 
Set was the genius of destruction and mischief, in some radical way con- 
nected with the sea, and I believe was the demon of the Red sea He was 
the demon of the desert also. The Red sea is the sea of the desert lying 
between the Lybian and Arabian deserts. Egyptologists are familiar with 
the varying history of the religious worship of this deity, its opposition to 
the systems of Nile worship and Osiris worship, and its later fusion with 
the Sutech-Baal worship of the Syrian immigrants. 
I wish to point out a plausible geographical explanation of the original 
idea of Set, derived from the shape of his ideograph. 
In hieroglyphic inscriptions running from left to right, the animal sits 
facing the west, his back slopes south-east, and his ears are often portrayed 
not only diverging but pointing a little forward, a little west of the verti- 
cal. I fancy that a representation of the Red sea, with its two gulfs of 
Suez and Akabah, was intended ; and that its tail was meant to represent 
the Persian gulf, forked to represent the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. 
A forked vertical tail to an animal so simply constructed in the ordinary 
shape of a jackal was certainly a most extraordinary freak of fancy, if 
there lay no hidden meaning behind the design. It cannot be objected 
that the old Egyptians were not good geographers. The orientation of the 
pyramids in the fourth dynasty, and the expedition of Hannu to Punt, in 
the 11th or first Theban dynasty, are in evidenee to the contrary. But it is 
a question how early the Egyptians knew Mesopotamia or Chalde well 
enough to represent its two rivers (the rivals of their Nile) by the fork of 
a tail to their ocean deity, or otherwise. The god Set appears to have been 
worshiped by the mother of the builder of the first pyramid. The cam- 
paign of Kedarluomer was a comparatively late event, probably subse 
quent to the 12th dynasty ; but it suggests similar movements on a less 
heroic scale in much earlier days; and no one has yet made out the direct. 
tion from which the pyramid builders came to take, possession of Egypt. 
It is evident that they introduced a foreign Ra, and Hor worship ; but 
. whether they brought with them.Hathor and Set, or found them in Egypt 
is not known. 
I think the Ata-Teta-nomenclature of the very first dynasty is good 
evidence that the pre-pyramid rulers had come from Yemen ; but the 
pyramid builders would more likely come in from Syria, and stop at 
Memphis. If so, they would undoubtedly be familiar to someextent with 
Mesopotamia, if only through wandering merchants, or, if there were none 
such, through that transmission of information from region to region which 
has characterized all ages. 
ee 
