เครื่องรางเครื่องรางเทพีทาเวเรตTaweret amulet

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.

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.

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.