Sobek

Summary

Sobek is the Egyptian crocodile god, drawn as a man with a crocodile's head or as a whole crocodile. Because crocodiles lived along the whole Egyptian Nile he was worshipped everywhere, and most of his temples had a sacred lake in which one or more crocodiles lived. His chief cult centres were Kom Ombo in Upper Egypt and the Faiyum, where the "City of Crocodiles" stood near the temple of present-day Medinet el-Faiyum.

His story is a story of water. Egyptians made Sobek, whose domain was the waters of the Nile, a bringer of the flood, and in the Hymn to Hapy, when the flood comes, "Sobk, Neith's child, bares his teeth": the crocodile rejoices at the rising water as people do. His mother in Egyptian belief is Neith, lady of Sais, and from the Old Kingdom Neith was regarded as the partner of Seth. Because the Faiyum was the heart of his cult, his name was joined to the king's in the Middle Kingdom and then to Re himself, as Sobek-Re. By the Ptolemaic period he was identified with many gods and took on the aspect of a universal god.

At Kom Ombo the Ptolemies built a double temple: two gates, two axes and two sanctuaries, one half for Sobek with Hathor and Khonsu, the other for Horus the Elder. Processions went from the temple to the necropolis where the "dead gods" were buried: Re, Geb and Osiris, all three regarded there as forms of Sobek. The temple also had a "room of the inundation".

Herodotus knew the crocodile and its cult. Some Egyptians, he says, hold crocodiles sacred and others treat them as enemies: those around Thebes and Lake Moeris, the Faiyum, raise a tame crocodile, hang ornaments of glass and gold in its ears and bracelets on its forefeet, give it special food, and when it dies embalm it and bury it in a sacred coffin; around Elephantine they eat it. Beneath the labyrinth near the "City of Crocodiles", he adds, are chambers the keepers would show no one, holding the tombs of the kings who built it and of the sacred crocodiles.

The idea Sobek's cult turns on is that what the river brings comes together: water, silt and crocodile. The crocodile appears when the water rises and eats people and beasts, and it is at the same time the sign of the flood that feeds the land. The people of the Faiyum honoured it, and the people of Elephantine at the cataract ate it, as Herodotus reports. In the tale of the Doomed Prince the Seven Hathors decree that the king's son will die by the crocodile, the snake or the dog, and the crocodile follows him from Egypt to the foreign land and tells him: "I am your fate that has come after you." Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature II, pp. 200–203.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Sbk: s, then b, then k. The project's Egyptian essay reads it from sabaka and says the sense is "poured out": Sobek is the water that pours. The three letters are those of Arabic s-b-k in the same order. In Lane sabaka is to melt gold or silver, clear it of its dross and pour it into a mould; a sabīka is a piece so cast; and "trials have sabakat him" means they have tested him. The root holds melting and pouring into a mould, which is what the flood does when it pours water and silt into the basins of the fields. The Egyptian dictionary has a verb of the same letters with a final aleph: sbkꜣ, to make pregnant.

Linguistic Root

Sabaka

The Egyptian essay offers two readings: sabaḥa first, since the crocodile swims, then sabaka in the sense of "poured out", and grades both "medium". Sabaka keeps all three letters as they are: s is s, b is b, k is k. Sabaḥa puts ḥ in place of k, and there is no regular match between Egyptian k and Arabic ḥ; Egyptian k usually stays k. So sabaka leads here.

The sense in Lane is not quite "poured out", as the essay writes, but melting, refining and pouring into a mould: sabaka al-dhahab, he melted the gold and poured it into the misbaka, an iron mould like half a cane split lengthwise; the sabīka is the oblong piece that comes out of it, and the sabbāk the man who does this. Lane records that a desert Arab likened a smooth, hard-to-climb mountain to a sabīka. Pouring into a mould is what this reading carries over to the flood: water and silt poured into the basins of the fields, taking their shape. The Egyptian verb sbkꜣ, to make pregnant, has the same letters plus an aleph; the Egyptian dictionary does not derive Sobek's name from it, but it puts into these letters the fertility the Metropolitan Museum ascribes to Sobek. The reading is complete in its letters; its open point is the sense, since sabaka in the lexica is a metalworker's word and its link to water is this reading's own.

Crocodile and timsāḥ

Arabic keeps a word of Egyptian origin for Sobek's animal. Egyptians called the crocodile mzḥ; Herodotus says the Egyptians do not call it krokodeilos but khampsa, and his commentator notes that the Egyptian word survives in Arabic timsāḥ, with the Egyptian feminine article prefixed. Lane gives timsāḥ and timsaḥ as a well-known animal of the Nile of Egypt and of the Mihrān river in Sind, which seizes men and oxen, dives with them and devours them.

Key Mythic Narratives

Lord of Bakhu

The Pyramid Texts name "Sobek, Lord of Bakhu", and in the judgment chapter of the Book of Going Forth by Day the dead person, asked the names of the parts of the gate, answers that one of them is called "Eye-of-Sobk-Lord-of-Bakhu". Bakhu is the mountain of the east: in the Famine Stela the king grants Khnum the land from Manu as western border to Bakhu as eastern border.

Horus on the crocodiles

On the magical stelae of the Late Period the child Horus stands on two crocodiles and grasps snakes, scorpions, an antelope and a lion, with the head of Bes above him. Here the crocodile is one of the harmful animals the child overcomes, and people poured water over these stelae and drank it to be healed of bites and stings.

The crocodile in wisdom

The Instruction of Amenemope describes the heated man drowning in the flood while "the crocodiles are vicious", and calls the silent man "the crocodile that makes no sound". In a love song the lover crosses the river at flood-time to his beloved while "a crocodile waits in the shallows", and the crocodile becomes like a mouse to him.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Egyptian rereading essay says that Egyptians did not "worship animals" but used animal images as tools to explain the cosmos, as we use mathematical symbols, and it makes the Nile the axis of all their myths.

Sobek's cult shows this in people's lives. The crocodile was a daily danger to anyone filling a jar, watering a beast or crossing the river, and honouring it in the Faiyum made the danger something known and named, fed in the temple lake, adorned and buried. The people of Elephantine who ate it lived at the cataract and the people of the Faiyum who honoured it lived on a lake; Herodotus gives no reason for the difference. When Sobek became Sobek-Re, the animal that comes out of the water became an image of the sun that comes out of it every morning.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Sobek is worshipped as a bringer of the flood beside Hapy, which places him in Egypt's agricultural year: the rising water brings the crocodile with it, and the flood season is known by it. In India a sea creature called makara, sometimes confused with the crocodile, is the emblem of Kāma, god of desire, according to Monier-Williams; Sobek was an Egyptian god of fertility, so the two meet in a water animal tied to fecundity.