Set

Description of Set

Set Egyptian God, in Egyptian mythology, is the god of the desert, that is, “foreign countries”, the personification of the evil principle, brother and killer of Osiris, one of the four children of the earth god Geb and Nut, the goddess of the sky. In Egyptian myth-making, the god Set is depicted as the first to shed blood, and his own brother Osiris became a victim. However, Set was not always an evil god. In the Old Kingdom (3150-2613 BC) Set was the most beloved deity of the ancient Egyptians. In the era of the Old Kingdom, Set was revered as a warrior god, assistant to Ra and patron of the pharaohs. The sacred animals of Set were considered to be a pig (“disgust for the gods”), an antelope, a giraffe, and the main one was a donkey. The Egyptians imagined him as a man with a slender long body and a donkey’s head. As the personification of war, drought, death, Set also embodied the evil inclination – as the deity of the merciless desert, the god of strangers: he chopped down sacred trees, ate the sacred cat of the goddess Bast, etc.

Style Variations

Bold – Light – Solid – Duotone
Each variation is included in the file package.

Egyptian main description

Egyptian Symbols

Egyptian hieroglyphics are arguably one of the most famous examples of symbolism across history. Created by the ancient Egyptians, this served as their formal writing system. Hieroglyphics can be dated back to the 32nd century BC, and perhaps even earlier. Evidence demonstrates that this writing system continued into the Roman period of the 4th century AD. However, much of the knowledge of hieroglyphics and their meanings were lost after the end of pagan temples in the 5th century. There was no existing knowledge of what these symbols meant, how they were meant to be read and their significance. Hieroglyphics were decoded in the 1820s with the aid of the Rosetta Stone by Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion. These symbols are not just phonetic sounds or symbols. In fact, they are a combination of different elements. As Jean-François Champollion discovered, hieroglyphics are a “complex system” that encompasses “figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once.” For many Egyptians, this form of writing was seen as the “words of God” and thus used by priests. Generally, hieroglyphics in cursive form were used for religious texts and engraved into wood or written on papyrus. They are written in rows or columns and can be read either left to right or right to left. The direction can be established by seeing which way the human or animal figure faces at the beginning of the line.