Bes

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Bes is the dwarf-shaped protective deity of ancient Egypt, a household god charged above all with the safety of women in childbirth, of newborns, and of sleepers. He is among the most recognizable figures in Egyptian art and among the least typical: where the great gods are shown in dignified profile, Bes faces forward, squat and bandy-legged, with a broad bearded face, lolling tongue, and a mane or plumed headdress. The frontal stare was the point. He was meant to be looked at, and to look back at whatever threatened the people in his care.

His domain was the home rather than the temple. Bes belonged to the daily, bodily dangers that the cult of the state gods did not address — labor and birth, the vulnerable hours of sleep, the fevers and bites of childhood. His image was carved on the legs of beds and headrests, on mirrors and cosmetic jars, on the small wands and amulets that surrounded a household, and painted in the rooms where women gave birth. The accompanying goddess Taweret, a pregnant hippopotamus standing upright, served much the same purpose, and the two are often found together. Bes drove off harm by frightening it: he is shown brandishing knives, strangling serpents, and beating a tambourine, the noise and the grotesque face both functioning as protection.

The name is used loosely. Egyptologists note that “Bes” came to cover a family of related dwarf-figures with overlapping roles rather than a single sharply defined god, and that he has no developed mythology of his own — no birth story, no place in the great cosmic narratives, almost no temple of his own until very late. His standing came from below, from popular use, and it proved remarkably durable. Attested from the Middle Kingdom, he grew steadily more popular through the New Kingdom and remained so for two millennia.

That long life carried him outward. In the Greco-Roman period Bes appears far beyond Egypt, on Phoenician and Cypriot objects, in the Levant, and as a protective device on amulets and gems prized across the Mediterranean; oracle chambers bearing his name operated in Roman Egypt. His face, easy to copy and needing no learned context, traveled where the formal gods did not — an instance of the syncretizing exchange of the late ancient world working from the popular end rather than the priestly one.

What the surviving evidence preserves is therefore less a theology than a practice: the steady presence, in ordinary rooms, of a figure both comic and fierce, kept near the cradle and the bed. He guarded the thresholds the larger gods overlooked.

→ In the library: Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

→ Related: Syncretism