Lions have earned their place as enduring symbols of strength, courage, and royalty. Known as the "King of the Jungle," lions are majestic creatures with fascinating traits and a rich history that spans centuries. The lion's symbolism dates back thousands of years.
The Great Sphinx of Giza, a prominent example of leonine symbolism in ancient Egypt.
Ancient Significance
In Ancient Egypt, lions were revered as war deities, embodying power, strength, and courage. Their association with deities like Sekhmet-often depicted as a lion-headed goddess-cemented their divine status.
Religious and Cultural Representations
Lions continue to hold religious significance in various cultures. In Christian art, the Lion of Judah symbolizes Jesus' sovereignty, authority, and bravery. This imagery portrays the lion as both majestic and fierce, echoing its natural characteristics.
Glencairn’s Egyptian collection includes images of cats in bronze, stone, faience and other materials.
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The lion was a complex symbol to the ancient Egyptians, capable of representing alternately danger and chaos or protection and the defeat of chaos. It was a secondary attribute of several gods, and of the king as well. The lion figures on many of the earliest examples of Egyptian artwork. Lions appear on the decorated handles of Predynastic flint knives, and on several of the famous palettes. If one includes the fanciful beast that appears to be a lion with a very long, snakelike neck, it even appears on the Narmer Palette.
Two sources, the Gebel Tarif knife and the Hierakonpolis Palette, use the lion in the very same manner that it would be used in dynastic artwork, depicting the lion in its pounce upon its prey. It may be premature to assume the same interpretation in these cases, but the lion that appears on the Battlefield Palette looks tantalizingly like a royal symbol. In this case, a larger-than-life lion is attacking a defeated enemy in the wake of a successful battle, with bound captives and fallen foes around it. Certainly, the lion was used as in this manner in dynastic history.
Among the treasures of Tutankhamun is an alabaster unguent jar which features a sculpted lion on its lid and carved lions on its sides. The prominent lion on the lid, presented in a state of repose, bears the inscription “the Good God, Nebkheperure” on its shoulder; Nebkheperure was the “throne name” of Tutankhamun, while the phrase “the Good God” was a typical way to speak of the Pharaoh in the third person, used much as we might say “His Majesty.” This sculpture makes the identification clear, but it is the carvings on the side that gives it its context.
In desert scenes, lions are shown in the act of bringing down their prey. As long as the lion represents the king himself, such a scene depicts his strength and his mastery over the natural world. Of course, a lion in the wild is potentially dangerous to any human; when the king went on the hunt, a lion would make a most worthy foe. Under such circumstances, the symbolic meaning would reverse itself.
In general, however, the lion was depicted far more often as a guardian of Ma’at than as an opponent; in part this was the result of the Egyptian artistic tradition that made the image the magical equivalent of the reality. It did not do to depict the lion as a rampant threat, for fear of letting such a threat loose in the world; if the lion were a foe, it was best to show it just after its defeat, with two or three of the king’s arrows sticking out of it. An important variant of this image is that of a sphinx, in which a conquering lion is depicted with the head of a king.
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The Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khafre, or Chephren, pioneered this image in the form of the Great Sphinx, but subsequent Pharaohs happily adopted the image for themselves. Even the lesser king Tutankhamun used the image, appearing among his tomb goods on a ceremonial shield and on a colorful box. Kings did not use the lion image alone; several gods have leonine aspects, and one important goddess had the lion for her primary aspect.
Some early lion gods or goddesses, such as Tjel and Pakhet, were assimilated into more important divinities; this helps to account for lion aspects in the case of gods that otherwise should not have such an aspect. Horus, for example, assimilated the northeastern god Tjel, giving a lion image to a god overwhelmingly associated with the falcon. Shu, the god of the air, and his sister Tefnut have a secondary lion aspect, based upon an early myth that had them take the forms of lion cubs at their own infancy.
The outgrowth of that myth has those lion-forms take on a life of their own as the guardians of the horizon, protecting the sun-god Ra in his rising and setting. The beloved cat goddess, Bastet, may very well have begun as a lioness goddess, and over time her image may have been softened to that of the figure we know today. The same cannot be said of another goddess often linked to her, and to the aforementioned Pakhet: Sekhmet, the daughter of Ra and the wife of Ptah.
Her name means “the Powerful One,” and by those two family connections, she is a part of both of the dominant creation myths in Egyptian history. No docile housecat is she; she is the manifestation of the sun’s power to wither life with its heat. In this, however, she typifies the dual nature of the lion as destroyer and protector: she became the goddess of disease, especially plagues, but also the one to whom one turned to protect oneself from diseases. Her priesthood was renowned for its medical acumen.
Bold and virile, cruel and unpredictable, fierce and mighty, the lion conveyed many meanings to the ancient Egyptians. Sometimes only the context could determine which of the contradictory meanings applied, and sometimes, the contradictions stood at the heart of the meaning.
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Two lions of the god Aker Vignette from a papyrus, The Book of the Dead of Ani, Theban scribe, frame 7. New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty, reign of Ramesses II, around 1250 BC. Now in the British Museum. EA 10470,7 Aker appears as a pair of twin lions, one named Duaj (meaning “yesterday”) and the other Sefer (meaning “tomorrow”). Aker was thus often titled “He who’s looking forward and behind”.
Lions were widespread in prehistoric times and still present in the Nile Valley in the late Pharaonic history. The lion was an important element in royal symbolism and divine iconography, the latter being mostly female.
In the hieroglyphic graphic code, the Egyptians represented the feline in two ways: lying down, with a majestic air, or erect, in the act of walking. The reclining pose is the one that has been used since the Predynastic Period in a wide repertoire of sculptures in the round, and it is from it that the later iconography of the sphinx developed.
Hunefer before the Two lions of the Aker deity, representing “Today” and “Tomorrow”.
Book of the Dead of Hunefer (Hw-nfr). British Museum. EA9901,5 Hunefer before the Two lions of the Aker deity, representing “Today” and “Tomorrow”. A personification of the horizon, Aker was a deity of the Earth and Underworld, believed to guard both the eastern and western horizons (Bakhu and Manu) Illustration of Aker One of the two lions of god Aker One of the two lions of god Aker, who was closely associated with the journey of the sun through the realms of the underworld.
Aker was first depicted as the torso of a recumbent lion with a widely opened mouth. Later, he was depicted as two recumbent lion torsos merged with each other and still looking away from each other.
New Kingdom, 20th Dynasty, ca. 1189-1077 BC. The lion has been an important symbol to humans for tens of thousands of years. The earliest graphic representations feature lions as organized hunters with great strength, strategies, and skills. Detail of a ritual Menat necklace, exhibited at Altes Museum, Berlin, catalogue number 23733. It shows a ritual performed before a statue of Sekhmet sitting on her throne. Sekhmet is flanked by the goddess Wadjet as the cobra and the goddess Nekhbet as the white vulture, symbols of lower and upper Egypt, respectively.
The earliest tomb paintings in Ancient Egypt, at Nekhen, c. 3500 BC, classified as Naqada, possibly Gerzeh, culture include images of lions, including an image of a human (or deity) flanked by two lions in an upright posture. Among ancient Egyptians, from prehistoric times through well documented records, the war goddess Sekhmet, a lioness,[4] later depicted as woman with a lioness head, was one of their major deities. She was a sun deity as well as a fierce warrior and protector. Usually she was assigned significant roles in the natural environment.
The Egyptians held that this sacred lioness was responsible for the annual flooding of the Nile,[4] the most significant contributing factor to the success of the culture. Sometimes with regional differences in names, a lioness deity was the patron and protector of the people, the king, and the land. Similar regional lioness deities assumed minor roles in the pantheon or, when so significant in a region, continued local religious observance in their own right, such as Bast.
During the New Kingdom the Nubian gods Maahes (god of war and protection and the son of Bast) and Dedun (god of incense, hence luxury and wealth) were depicted as lions. Maahes was absorbed into the Egyptian pantheon, and had a temple at the city the invading Greeks called Leontopolis, "City of Lions", at the delta in Lower Egypt. His temple was attached to the major temple of his mother, Bast. Bast, originally depicted as a lioness and the "eye of Ra" in the delta region,[4] was the parallel deity to Sekhmet in the southern region.
Her nature gradually changed after the unification of the country and Sekhmet prevailed throughout. At that time Bast changed into the goddess of personal protection with different responsibilities, and often was depicted as a very tame lioness or a cat. She is shown to the left atop an alabaster jar that contained precious oils and lotions. The sphinx of Ancient Egypt shows the head and shoulders of a human and the body of a lioness. The statues represents Sekhmet, who was the protector of the pharaohs.
The lion (Panthera leo) was associated with the sun and the pharaoh, the most powerful elements of life and death in ancient Egypt. And even after Egypt’s climate became drier and the prides migrated south, the lion continued to feature prominently in Egyptian culture.
“The lion played a tremendous role in the iconography of ancient Egypt,” says Conni Lord, an Egyptologist with the Animal Mummy Research Project at the Nicholson Museum of Sydney University. “The lion was a symbol of royal authority [but] lion imagery was also used in objects of daily life, such as chairs and beds. These might have been purely decorative, but it is likely there was a magical meaning to do with protection.”
It’s difficult to imagine prides of lions roaming Egypt today, but as late as 1000 B.C. the big cats idled on the banks of the Nile-and some even lounged in palaces as domesticated pets for the royals.
Because depictions of lions were so common in ancient Egypt, researchers have long wondered why only one lion mummy to date has ever been discovered among the millions of mummified animals the Ancient Egyptians interred. Now, a team of archaeologists led by Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has revealed five more lion mummies, likely cubs, discovered at the Bubasteion necropolis-literally, a catacomb of cat mummies-in Saqqara.
The mummified lion cubs, which are each about three feet in length, are believed to be eight months old. They were found together with a large collection of wooden and bronze statues of cats and other mummified animals, including cobras and crocodiles. The Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the artifacts likely belonged to Egypt’s 26th Dynasty (664-525 B.C.)
The lion held a privileged status in ancient Egypt, regarded as the fiercest warrior in the wild and a symbol of both danger and protection. Pharaohs were known to take part in lion hunts to demonstrate their own supremacy, including Amenhotep III, who claimed to have killed 102 lions in the first ten years of his reign.
The big cats were also held as pets in royal complexes, with Ramesses II and Tutankhamun both illustrated with a sitting lion. The Greek author Aelian famously wrote that when he visited Saqqara he saw lions in temples that were fed oxen and sung to while they dined.
Even so, the lion was never associated strongly with a single deity such as the ibis to Thoth or the jackal to Anubis. This missing link to a specific deity and cult could be the reason why lion mummies are encountered much less frequently than other animals, she adds. Another explanation could be that they simply haven’t been discovered yet.
“There are really no practical reasons for the lack of lion mummies,” Lord says. “The ancient Egyptians were perfectly able to mummify a creature of this size. The Apis bull, a cult animal, was mummified using the very best techniques including removal of the organs.”
The only difference with mummifying a lion is that the organ removal would be smellier since it’s a carnivore, said Salima Ikram, an archaeologist at the American University in Cairo, who performed a CT scan on some of the lion mummies.
Ikram says that the significance of the find is “extremely important” as it will give researchers new insights into how lions were captured in ancient Egypt, and whether they were bred or traded.
“It is quite possible that as the Saqqara excavation continues more lion mummies will come to light,” she said.
By the pharaonic period, the number of lions in ancient Egypt had declined greatly compared to numbers during Predynastic times. But even at the outset during predynastic Egypt, the symbolism of the lion had become established quickly. The possible connection between the king and the lion could stem from the hunting of these animals by chiefs during the predynastic period [1]. The significance of the lion then continues throughout pharaonic Egypt and is often shown as being both a representation of the king or the prey of the king. Figure 1 shows the image of a lion, as the pharaoh, subjugating a Nubian, a group considered to be one of the traditional enemies of Egypt and shown frequently in Ramesside era art especially pieces belonging to the reign of Rameses II[2].
The usual representation found in art is a bound Nubian kneeling before a lion that holds the back of the man’s head in its jaws. This image creates a powerful feeling of dominance by Egypt over their enemies. In general the enemies of Egypt as referred to as the Nine Bows. The Nine Bows is a broad term and should not be taken literally but is a catchment term used to cover all potential enemies of Egypt. Nubians and Asiatics always appear among the enemies their arms tied behind their backs, are depicted on many temple walls[3]. In Egyptian art, the bows were frequently depicted in such a way that (a representation of) the king literally walked on them, thus under the feet of a statue of the king, on the base of a throne or, as for example with Tutankhamun, on sandals[4] (Figure 2). Or in the case of this handle shows the subduing of such enemies.
Pharaohs also took part in lion hunts Figure 3-5. Amenhotep III seemed to be a particular love of lion hunting and other game hunting as a sport. Among over 200 commemorative scarabs Figure 3 that date to his reign generally covers five different events; Bull Hunts, lakes, the arrival of and marriage of his new wife Gilukhepa and finally lion hunts. 123 of the 200 of the scarabs records the number of lions 102 that were slain by Amenhotep ‘with his own arrows from his first regnal year up to his tenth[5]. The king’s success as a hunter stood for his victory on the battlefield and symbolized the triumph of order, embodied in the divine rule over the forces of chaos.
The ostracon in Figure 4 shows a hunting scene. Showing an unidentified Ramsesside king is represented symbolically slaying the enemies of Egypt in the form of a lion. As lions characteristically lived on the desert margins they came to be considered guardians of the East and West.
Furthermore, the sun could be personified as a lion as the god Aker guarded the gateway that the sun came in each day. When it comes to leonine gods and goddesses there are a few instantly you think of Sekhmet, Bastet and maybe even Mihos. Lion gods were not as important as lion goddesses, but the lion as we have learnt was a symbol of royal power. Leonine goddesses have a short mane or ruff like that of a lynx or adolescent lion[8]. The lion often formed part of Egyptian monsters such as Bes / Taweret and other mythical creatures such as the Sphinx all magical guardians of people and places[9]. According to the myth of Osisirs four lion goddesses Wadjeyt, Sekhmet, Bastet and Shesmetert [10].
The most important lion goddess though is Sekhemt (Figure 6) who was regarded as one of the Eyes of Ra and the goddess who almost destroyed mankind. Given the power and potency of lions for the ancient Egyptians, it is no surprise that amulets of recumbent lions were produced from as early as the 6th Dynasty right up until the Greqaco-Roman Period[11].
Another lion-headed goddess is Bastet (Figure 7). I know that she is commonly thought of as being a cat but up until the second millennium BCE, she was shown as a lion-headed woman[12]. She is seen to be a protective maternal figure to the king but as a fierce destroyer of his enemies. But that is not the only lion-headed deity in the family Bastet and Amun-Ra are believed to be the parents of the God Mahes/ (Mihos in Greek (Figure 8) was also lion deity, so it runs in the family. The Delta site of Leontopolis was sacred to Mahes, the name itself gives it away as it translates to lion city. He was regarded locally as important but not a diety of high regard across Egpyt but he is often shown as part of a slue of gods who helped the sun god in the fight against Apophis the serpent of chaos[13].
Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of war and healing.
The following table summarizes the key lion-related deities in ancient Egypt:
| Deity | Role and Attributes |
|---|---|
| Sekhmet | Goddess of war, healing, and the sun's destructive power. Often depicted with a lioness head. |
| Bastet | Goddess of protection, fertility, and domesticity. Originally depicted as a lioness, later as a cat. |
| Maahes (Mihos) | God of war and protection, son of Bastet and Amun-Ra. |
| Aker | God of the Earth and Underworld, depicted as two lions guarding the eastern and western horizons. |
Were There Lions In Ancient Egypt? - Ancient Wonders Revealed
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