Ipet's earliest secure role is maternal. In the Pyramid Texts the dead king addresses Ipy as 'my mother' and asks for her breast so that he may drink her white, bright and sweet milk. The passage is not a myth of Ipet raising a child on earth. It is a funerary transformation in which the king claims divine nurture as he enters a renewed existence.

This nursing role helps explain why a hippopotamus form could become protective. Female hippopotamuses were powerful animals with strong maternal associations, and Egyptian religious imagery turned that combination of fertility and ferocity into divine guardianship. Ipet can appear with a hippopotamus body and other composite features, but she shares much of this visual language with Taweret, Reret and related goddesses.

The overlap with Taweret requires caution. A standing pregnant hippopotamus goddess with crocodile or lion elements is not automatically Ipet. When an object carries no identifying inscription, modern naming can be uncertain. Ipet's identity is strongest where the ancient text actually names Ipy, Ipet or Opet.

Later funerary material gives Ipet an active protective dimension. The Book of the Dead tradition includes torch-bearing hippopotamus imagery associated with repelling danger and guarding the deceased. This does not replace the earlier maternal role. Nourishment and fiery defence are two ways the same divine mother can protect a vulnerable person at a threshold between life and renewed existence.

At Karnak, the Temple of Opet stands beside the temple of Khonsu within the Amun precinct. Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities identifies it as a temple of the hippopotamus goddess Opet and notes that the surviving structure is predominantly Ptolemaic. Its decoration links the goddess with childbirth and with the complex Theban theology of Amun, Osiris and renewed divine life.

The temple's late theology should not be projected unchanged into the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts. The mother who nurses the dead king and the Ptolemaic goddess involved in Osirian renewal belong to different periods separated by many centuries. They are connected by name and maternal function, but Egyptian religion continually reworked divine relationships to suit new ritual and local contexts.

A late fourth-century BCE water clock in the British Museum offers another reminder that Ipet's image was flexible. The inscription names Ipet as a female deity attending Alexander the Great, yet the figure is represented as a woman rather than in the familiar hippopotamus form. This object confirms that the goddess could be identified by name even when her body did not follow the standard protective type.