Praise to the Great Cat

The combination of an animal head with a human body is a distinctive feature of images of ancient Egyptian deities. Fully human or fully animal representations also appear. Amun, whose most common epithet in the New Kingdom is “king of the gods,” is most often shown in anthropomorphic form, although in Nubian temples he can have a ram head. The goddess Taweret, a protector of women and children, appears almost exclusively as a pregnant hippopotamus.