Bes

Summary

Bes is the Egyptian household god, known by his frightening look: a dwarf's body, bowed legs, the mane and ears of a lion, his tongue usually sticking out, a headdress of upright feathers, and between his legs the tail of the animal skin he wears. As far as is known he had no cult place of his own; he appeared as a subsidiary god in the temples of other gods and was sometimes consulted as an oracle, and in a side chamber of the temple of Seti I at Abydos many visitors' inscriptions are dedicated to him. Bes is really the name for a whole group of gods whose traits are so mixed that they are hard to tell apart today; closest to him is a god of the same appearance called Aha, "the fighter", and he had a female counterpart, Beset.

Bes has no long story in the papyri; his story is told in the objects he was drawn on. He protects against every danger by his awful appearance and by what he holds: knives or snakes, since for Egyptians to be "in the hands" meant to be overcome; a large sꜣ sign, meaning protection; or a drum or tambourine, because music drives away evil spirits and puts people in a happier, less frightened mood. He is shown mastering a gazelle or a pig, animals of Seth. He is drawn on beds and headrests with his companion Taweret, the hippopotamus, because the sleeper, unaware of what is around him, is exposed to all the dangers of the night. He guards birth: he appears on the "magical knives" of hippopotamus ivory of the Middle Kingdom and on the walls of the temples' birth houses, among them the birth house at Dendera, and in the Late Period his head was worn as an amulet round the neck.

On a Middle Kingdom wand of hippopotamus ivory in the Metropolitan Museum a row of protective deities carries knives, with the words "protection of day" and "protection of night"; another wand carries an inscription saying it was used to protect a child, and the museum takes such wands to have protected mother and child at birth and in early life, and then to have been placed in tombs to protect the dead at their rebirth. From the cemetery at Lisht comes a small wooden figure of Beset, the female Bes, with the lion's mane and ears; like him she guarded mothers during and after childbirth, and their infants.

In the Late Period Bes rose higher. On the magical stelae on which the child Horus stands on crocodiles grasping snakes and scorpions, the face of Bes is shown above Horus almost every time, and the texts make clear that he is here the old sun god, rejuvenated in the solar child. In a magical papyrus in Brooklyn Bes appears with nine faces on one neck: a Bes face, a ram's, a falcon's, a crocodile's, a hippopotamus's, a lion's, a bull's, a baboon's and a cat's, and the text tells his enemies that they cannot live before this great form.

The idea Bes's images turn on is that an ugliness that frightens can be turned outward to protect. The fearsome-faced dwarf is drawn in the birth houses, on the protective wand and on the bed where people sleep, so that evil fears him and the household is safe. The smallest of the gods in body is the guard of the weakest people: the pregnant woman, the mother in labour, the infant and the sleeper.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Bs: b and s, nothing more. The project's Egyptian essay reads it from baʾs and grades the reading "very likely". In Lane baʾs is might and strength in war, courage, and war itself, and from it fear: one says lā baʾsa ʿalayka, "there is no fear for you", a phrase of safe-conduct said even to an enemy; and Lane notes that bās is also said without the hamza. On this reading Bes is al-baʾs: fearsome might in fighting, which is what the Egyptians themselves name in his double Aha, "the fighter". And it is what the images make him: a frightening force turned against evil spirits, so that for the household it is lā baʾsa ʿalaykum, "no fear for you".

Linguistic Root

Al-baʾs

The Egyptian name has two letters, b and s. Arabic baʾs has three: b, hamza and s. The hamza is what drops, and Lane himself says that bās is used for baʾs, the hamza being suppressed by rule. So b stays b and s stays s, with no shift.

The sense in Lane: baʾusa, he became mighty and strong in war, courageous; baʾs, might in war, courage, war itself, and from it fear, as in lā baʾsa ʿalayka, "there is no fear for you", a phrase that grants an enemy safety; baʾs is also harm and severe punishment. The same root gives another sense, hardship and poverty, buʾs and baʾsāʾ. It is the first sense that meets the Egyptian: the god closest to Bes is called Ꜥḥꜣ, from the verb ꜥḥꜣ, "to fight", so the Egyptians themselves named his form "the fighter". The Egyptian dictionary also has bs for a golden amulet, and amulets with the head of Bes were among the most commonly worn.

Other readings in the essay

Beside baʾs the essay sets bass, which it glosses as "the sound of warning", "to warn with a hidden voice", and grades "likely". The Arabic lexica give bas bas as the sound for driving a beast and calling sheep, and ibsās as the soft sound with which the herdsman calms the she-camel at milking; this is the reading that leads for Bastet. Bass keeps b and s as they are, but its sense is calling and soothing more than warning, so it suits the gentle cat better than the fearsome dwarf. The essay also compares Bes with the child goddess Kumari in India and with what it calls Semitic jannūm, small protective beings.

Key Mythic Narratives

The head of Bes on the neck

The Metropolitan Museum has a Late Period mould in which amulets of the head of Bes were cast, and a steatite disk of the sixth to fourth century BCE with the head of Bes on its face and, on its back, Isis and Horus in the marshes, where Isis hid her son until he grew up, as the Metternich Stela tells. The dwarf who guards the birth of children in households here stands behind the first child, hidden by his mother.

The dwarf in wisdom

The Demotic Papyrus Insinger has a saying about small things: "Do not slight a small god, lest his retaliation teach you.. The small scarab is great through its secret image. The small dwarf is great because of his name. The small snake has poison." The saying does not name Bes, but it says what his images say: that the small and despised may be the greatest guard.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Egyptian rereading essay says that Egyptians used animal images as tools to explain the cosmos, not as gods in the literal sense. Bes is an example of this in the household: the lion's mane and ears, the protruding tongue, the knife and the drum are tools with which people faced their fear at the most dangerous moments of life.

In an Egyptian household birth was the gravest thing a family went through: the mother or the newborn could die with no visible cause. The Global Egyptian Museum notes that after giving birth the mother withdrew for a ritual purification of at least two weeks to a special place outside the house, often on the roof, shaped like a pavilion of poles with convolvulus and vines growing up them. Bes and Taweret were drawn on beds and headrests and on the walls of the temples' birth houses, and the music Bes carries drives away evil spirits and makes people less afraid.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Mesopotamia has an image that answers Bes's from the other side. There Lamaštu, Anu's daughter cast out of heaven, enters the house through the door pivot, counts the months of pregnant women, blocks the door of the woman in labour and seizes the child in its belly, and is driven out with incantations and amulets. The fear is the same in both lands: fear for the mother and newborn at the hour of birth. But the people of Mesopotamia gave the danger a body to be driven out, and the Egyptians gave protection a body to be hung up. Closer to Bes there is Pazuzu, king of the wind demons, drawn with Lamaštu on the amulets: ugly and frightening, not good in himself, but he drives her back to the underworld. Bes and Pazuzu are both an ugliness used to drive another ugliness away from mother and child.

In Egypt itself Bes stands in the birth houses beside Khnum, who shapes the child on his wheel, and beside Hathor, who bears her son at Dendera.