A Turquoise Faience Figure of a Hippopotamus, 11th/12th Dynasty, 2081-1759 B.C.

portrayed as if standing in a marsh along the banks of the Nile, the left legs advanced, with tapering tail and bulging eyes, the massive body painted in black with a symmetrical composition of the buds, pads, and flowers of the blue lotus, a lotus flower on top of the head.

Christie's, London, November 17th, 1977, no. 515, illus.
McAlpine Ancient Art, London, 1987

For related examples cf. Louvre, E. 7709 (J. Vandier, Manuel d'archéologie égyptienne, vol. III, Paris, 1958, pl. LXXXVI, 5), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Hayes, Scepter of Egypt, vol. I, fig. 142), and Sotheby's, New York, December 9th, 2003, no. 49.

Diodorus Siculus, a classical author who visited Egypt in the last decades of the Ptolemaic period, makes the following observation about the Nile hippopotamus: "Being a river and land animal, it spends the days in the streams, exercizing in the deep water, while, at night, it forages about the countryside on the grain and hay, so that, if this animal were prolific and reproduced each year, it would entirely destroy the farms of Egypt" (I.35).

According to Arielle Kozloff, it is hard to accept that these hippopotami represented evil forces in ancient Egyptian belief... As denizens of the Underworld, they were associated with the evil god Seth - the antithesis of the good god Horus who was represented on earth by the living Pharaoh. One of Egypt's earliest kings was believed to have been killed by a hippo; perhaps in retaliation, many temple walls bear scenes of the falcon-headed Horus standing in a skiff and harpooning a partially or wholly submerged hippo. In the Old and New Kingdom court officials also had themselves or their servants depicted on their tomb walls engaged in this activity; but Middle Kingdom officials did not... Since the statuettes have been found only in small burial chambers or in graves without relief decoration, they may be substitutes for the full pictorial scene" (Gifts of the Nile, p. 238, nos. 142-143). On the protective magical function of these figures see Houlihan, The Animal World of the Pharaohs, p. 121.

See also Hayes, Scepter of Egypt, vol. 1, p. 226, where Hayes observes that the people of Prehistoric Egypt probably saw the hippopotamus "as a huge and all devouring monster, like the Leviathan of biblical legend or the dragon of later eras. With time and the gradual thinning out or withdrawal southward of the animals, this primeval viewpoint changed, and the hunting of the hippopotamus became a sport indulged in with zest by servants of the kings and nobles of the Old Kingdom, who are frequently represented harpooning the great beasts from light skiffs of papyrus. It is also probable that, like the crocodile, the hippopotamus was believed to have been diverted by a propitiatory process from actions perilous to man to those benevolent towards him."