Bes

Bes is unlike the other gods of Egypt in almost every way, and that is the point. Where the great deities are shown in solemn profile, Bes is drawn full-face, staring out at the viewer, a bandy-legged bearded dwarf with a lion's mane and protruding tongue, a deliberately grotesque, apotropaic face meant to frighten off whatever threatens the vulnerable. He belonged not to the temples but to daily life: protector of the home, of pregnant women and of children, driver-away of snakes, scorpions and bad dreams. His image was carved on beds, headrests, mirrors, cosmetic pots and the birth-bricks on which women delivered, and amulets of him were worn by ordinary Egyptians for millennia. His popularity outlasted pharaonic religion, and Bes figures continued to be made into the Roman period, one of the most enduring of all Egyptian protective images.

Bes appears prominently in the mammisi, the small birth-houses attached to major Ptolemaic and Roman-period temples such as those at Dendera, Edfu and Philae, where the ritual re-enacted each year was the birth of the temple's divine child. Carved images of Bes appear at the top of the columns of these birth-houses, keeping company there with the hippopotamus-goddess Taweret and the Seven Hathors, the other protective deities of Egyptian childbirth, a placement that shows Bes was not a marginal household charm but a deity built into state temple architecture wherever the theology of divine birth required his particular kind of protection.

Unlike most Egyptian deities, whose images stayed largely within Egypt's own religious sphere, Bes traveled. Phoenician and later Punic traders carried faience and stone amulets bearing his unmistakable full faced, grimacing form across the eastern and then the western Mediterranean during the early first millennium BCE, and archaeologists have recovered Bes figures and Bes headed pendants from Cyprus, from Levantine coastal sites, and from Phoenician and Punic settlements as far west as Sardinia, Ibiza, and Carthage, well beyond any context of Egyptian religious practice or Egyptian settlement. In many of these find spots Bes appears in tombs and domestic contexts, worn or placed as a protective charm much as he had been in Egypt itself, but detached from the specific Egyptian theology of childbirth and the mammisi birth houses, absorbed instead into local apotropaic custom as a generically fearsome, protective face whose original meaning traveling merchants may only partly have understood or transmitted.

This diffusion is part of a wider pattern art historians call orientalizing influence, in which Egyptian and Near Eastern motifs spread through Iron Age Mediterranean trade networks and were reworked by the cultures that received them, and Bes is among its clearest examples precisely because his grotesque, immediately recognizable face required no accompanying text to be understood as protective. The god of the Egyptian birthing room thus ended up, centuries later, guarding tombs and households from Sardinia to the Levant, carried by traders who dealt in his image long after any of them had walked past his columns at Dendera or Edfu.