In Egyptian mythology, Set (also spelt Sutekh, Setesh, Seteh) is an ancient god, who was originally the god of the desert, one of the two main biomes that constitutes Egypt, the other being the small fertile area either side of the Nile. Due to developments in the Egyptian language over the 3,000 years that Set was worshipped, by the Greek period, the t in Set was pronounced so indistinguishably from th that the Greeks spelt it as Seth.



As he was the god of the desert, Set was associated with sandstorms, and desert caravans. Due to the extreme hostility of the desert environment, Set was viewed as immensely powerful, and was regarded consequently as the chief god. One of the more common epithets was that he was great of strength, and in one of the Pyramid Texts it states that the king's strength is that of Set. As chief god, he was patron of Lower Egypt, where he was worshipped, most notably at Ombos. The alternate form of his name, spelt Setesh (st?), and later Sutekh (swtḫ), designates this supremacy, the extra sh and kh signifying majesty. The exact translation of Set is unknown for certain, but is usually considered to be either (one who) dazzles or pillar of stability, one connected to the desert, and the other more to the institution of monarchy.

Set formed part of the Ennead of Heliopolis, as a son of the earth (Geb) and sky (Nut), husband to the fertile land around the Nile (Nephthys), and brother to death (Ausare/Osiris), and life (Isis).

The word for desert, in Egyptian was dshrt, which is very similar to the word for red, dshr (in fact, it has the appearance of a feminine form of the word for red). Consequently, Set became associated with things that were red, including people with ginger hair, which is not an attribute that Egyptians generally had, and so he became considered to also be a god of foreigners.

Set's attributes as desert god lead to him also being associated with gazelles, and donkeys, both creatures living on the desert edge. Since sandstorms were said to be under his control as lord of the desert, and were the main form of storm in the dry climate of Egypt, during the Ramesside Period, Set was identified as various Canaanite storm deities, including Resheph.

The Set animal

In art, Set was mostly depicted as a mysterious and unknown creature, referred to by Egyptologists as the Set animal or Typhonic beast, with a curved snout, square ears, forked tail, and canine body, or sometimes as a human with only the head of the Set animal. It has no complete resemblance to any known creature, although it does resemble a composite of an aardvark, and a jackal, both of which are desert creatures, and the main species of aardvark present in ancient Egypt additionally had a reddish appearance (due to thin fur, which shows the skin beneath it). The earliest known representation of Set comes from a tomb dating to the Naqada I phase of the Predynastic Period (circa 4000 BC?3500 BC), and the Set-animal is even found on a mace-head of the Scorpion King, a Protodynastic ruler.

A new theory has it that the head of the Set animal is a representation of Mormyrus kannamae (Nile Mormyrid), which resides in the waters near Kom Ombo, one of the sites of a temple of Set, with the two square fins being what are normally interpreted as ears. However, it may be that part or all of the Set animal was based on the Salawa, a similarly mysterious canine creature, with forked tail and square ears, one member of which was claimed to have been found and killed in 1996 by the local population of a region of Upper Egypt. It may even be the case that Set was originally neither of these, but later became associated with one or both of them due to their similar appearance.