He is the Set animal, the Sha, the only animal used in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that we've never identified. He is almost certainly a canine, but has very distinctive triangular ears attached at the acute end to the head, and a perfectly straight tail, and often a very droopy snout. He is most prominently used as a representation of the god Set, in fact almost all depictions of Set show him with this animal's head, until literally thousands of years later when Set is instead associated with a donkey. This animal is also used as a determinative, a type of disambiguation glyph, clarifying that the word preceding it is somehow chaotic, often having to do with suffering, violence, or destructive storms.
Animals in hieroglyphs are very heavily stylized, they're almost cartoonish, since they have to be very easily distinguishable from other similar animals with different meanings, and so especially with time tend to be drawn to resemble previous examples instead of whatever the sign originally depicted. This is why I have selected two Old Kingdom examples, when the glyph was likely only a few centuries old at most, the first being a fairly clear depiction from the late Second Dynasty, approximately 28th century BCE, and the second being the first depiction we have of the animal (according to consensus), dating to at least the 30th century BCE, unfortunately he's kinda crammed in there and very far from the intended focal point of the piece, so perhaps it's not a very careful depiction.
What is he? does his kind still roam the remote stretches of Egyptian desert? did he breed with other canines leaving no identifiable trace in his descendants? it is possible that he never existed as a physical animal at all, but if so he would be the only fantastical animal used in hieroglyphs, and he's so realistically rendered that I want to pet him, even if he would possibly eat me afterwards. is he genuinely just a dog? had we already, back at the dawn of written language, bred such a glorious animal as he into existence? are we responsible for such an ear shape, such a straight tail? did his breed already die out centuries or millennia before the glyph he inspired finally died out as well?
Regardless, he will always be carried with us now. His immortalization as a written glyph means that he exists in the depths of almost every computing device we create these days, just in case we need him again, a Unicode code point of an ancient good boi: U+130E9 𓃩
I'm 99% sure that Set is the "source"/inspo for Seto Kaiba, since everything in Yu-Gi-Oh! is just secretly Egyptology. But inspo in more like "Set was The Main Bad Guy" and not, like, anything deeper than that. And the whole name thing, too.
A Set-animal1 based dragon woulda been really fucking cool, though.
Additional Egyptology fun fact: there is one additional Little Guy in hieroglyphs/is a god that does not (currently) exist: Bennu, who is a heron. And 𓅣 and 𓅤. He was the ba (the personality-part of your soul/being) of Ra, and did some rebirth stuff, so he was kinda a proto-phoenix and also maybe the reason why my Northern Phoenix Kingdom phoenixes are shaped like big ol' herons.
Based on how Bennu looks in art and such, it seems to be of a species of heron that lived in the Nile that is no longer extant. Which is kind of a bummer!
Also: here are some additional Set characters:
- 𓃪 - on a bowl thing
- 𓃫 - having a lie down
- 𓉁 - on a windmill on a fence???? look the only hieroglyphs I know are the bird block I'm not pretending to be an expert
- 𓁣 - as a guy (the animal-head-on-guy-body thing isn't supposed to be a literal representation it's supposed to show that the gods had both a feral creecher and regular guy forms)
- bonus 𓆏 - froge
Also also: anyone else notice that Bahamut ZERO is just Stardust Dragon
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that is the technical term for the greecher's species
