amuletsTaweret amulet

said ta-WER-et, from Ancient Egyptian tꜣ-wrt, 'she who is great'; Greek Θουέρις, Thouéris

also: Taurt · Ta-weret · Tawaret · Thoeris · hippopotamus goddess amulet

amuletAncient EgyptNubia and SudanThe LevantGreece and the AegeanEgypt Sudan Greece Lebanon Syria

A hippopotamus standing upright on two legs, with a lion's limbs and paws, a Nile crocodile down her back and tail, human breasts and a pregnant belly. She usually holds the sa sign, the hieroglyph that means 'protection'. She comes as a pendant, as a face on furniture, chairs, stools and headrests, on children's feeding cups, and as a vessel whose spout is a nipple.

cited

Egyptian tꜣ-wrt, 'she who is great' or simply 'great one' — a pacificatory address, the form of words used to calm a dangerous deity rather than to describe a kind one.
Her sister goddesses are named the same careful way: Ipet, 'the Nurse'; Reret, 'the Sow', from the Egyptian classification of hippopotami as water pigs; Hedjet, 'the White One', whose sense is less clear. cited

When

c. 3000 BCE – c. 390 CE cited

Period	Predynastic to Roman Egypt
How the date is known	excavated — dug up in a dated context
Note	The source dates protective amulets bearing female hippopotamuses to the Predynastic period, c. 3000–2686 BCE, and says the tradition of making and wearing them continued through Egyptian history into the Ptolemaic Kingdom and the Roman period, c. 332 BCE – 390 CE. Both ends are the source's own figures.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Pendant
Made of	Faience · Bone and ivory · Fired clay · Gold
Goes	At the neck · On a cradle · In the grave · At the hearth
Made by	household workshops; the ivory wands were used by nurses
It says	none; she is usually shown holding the sa sign, Gardiner V17, which literally means 'protection'
Colour	blue-green
Retired	no — it is kept
Note	bone-ivory covers the hippopotamus ivory the Middle Kingdom wands are cut from. No measurement was read, so length_mm is absent.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Death in childbirth citedsaid by Egyptian household practice — the source calls her the protective goddess of childbirth and fertility, with the epithet 'Lady of the Birth House'
Harm to a child — harm to an infant or a small child; common across the atlas, though not the largest class in it — see /story/most-of-them-are-for-children/ citedsaid by Egyptian mothers; the source says her amulets protected mothers and children from harm and that her powers were invoked particularly to protect children and their mothers
Infertility citedsaid by Egyptian household practice, which grouped her with the fertility goddesses
Danger to the dead — charms put in a grave for the person in it citedsaid by Egyptologists, reading the hippopotami placed in tombs as the goddess facilitating rebirth after death as she aided earthly birthsthe source presents this as a scholarly reading

The story

Egypt made two decisions about hippopotami and kept both. The male was chaos, hunted down by kings to show divine power. The female was the opposite, because she guards her young with everything she has — so the protective goddesses of the household are female hippopotami, and amulets in their likeness are among the oldest in the country. They start before 3000 BCE, in the Predynastic period, and the making and wearing of them runs the whole length of Egyptian history into the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, to about 390 CE.

Her amulet peaks in popularity at the very end. In the Ptolemaic and Roman centuries, when the temples were changing hands and the old state religion was thinning out, household amulets of Taweret and her fellow hippopotamus goddesses sold better than ever.

She worked at both ends of a life. In the Middle Kingdom her image is carved onto a class of curved implement made from hippopotamus ivory that Egyptologists call a wand or a knife; tomb paintings show these in the hands of nurses, and wear on the tips indicates they were used to draw protective patterns in the sand. Taweret is on almost all known wands. The other figures on them are the gods who escort the sun through the underworld at night. At the same time hippopotami decorated with marsh flora were being put in tombs, which Egyptologists read as the same goddess helping a dead person be reborn the way she helped a living one be delivered.

She survived Akhenaten. Objects bearing Taweret were found at Amarna, from a reign, about 1352–1336 BCE, when the worship of the traditional gods was proscribed in favour of the sun disc. Inference — what people keep when the state tells them to stop is a good measure of what an object is for, and a birth charm is not easy to give up.

She travelled by trade. Middle Kingdom contact with the Levant carried her into the religions there in the same maternal role. From the Levantine coast she reached Crete, where Minoan artists redrew her in their own style as the figure Aegean archaeologists call the Minoan Genius, and from Crete the image reached the mainland and appears in palace art at Mycenae. Nubia took her into its pantheon in the late Middle Kingdom, and she features in royal rituals at Kerma.

Do not confuse her with Ammit. Ammit is also a composite hippopotamus and she is there to eat the unjust at the weighing; Taweret and her kin nourish and help.

cited

How it is made and carried

Moulded or carved as a pendant, cut into furniture, moulded onto feeding cups, and poured from: New Kingdom vessels in her shape are taken to have purified the liquid poured out of them, since one of her epithets is 'She of the Pure Water', and some have their openings through the nipples. The hippopotamus-ivory wands were drawn with, in sand, by the nurse.

cited

Now

Not made as a birth charm. She is a museum object, a name in Egyptology, and a character in a television series. As of 2026 this project has read no account of anybody in Egypt using a Taweret at a birth.

inference

Where you can see one

The British Museum — Taweret amulets and hippopotamus-ivory wands in the Egyptian collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Taweret figures in the Egyptian galleries
The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology — Taweret amulets in the excavated amulet series

An accession number appears here only where it was read off a catalogue page that is linked. No link, no number.