Sobek came from the water. The Egyptians said he was the son of Neith, the grim goddess of Sais whose symbols were the bow and the weaver's shuttle, and that he rose from Nun, the dark primeval ocean that existed before the world was made. He was the Nile's own contradiction given teeth. The river fed Egypt, watered the fields, and brought the black silt that made the crops grow, and the same river hid a beast that could take a child from the bank in silence, leaving nothing but rings on the water. Sobek was both. He was the ferocity of the flood and its fertility, the rager and the giver, and the Egyptians prayed to him for the same reason they feared him: a god this dangerous was worth having on your side. The dead knew it too. The collection of afterlife spells that guided souls through the underworld contains incantations whose only purpose is to drive off the four crocodiles that lurked at the four corners of the world to devour the unwary soul, crying out: get back, crocodile of the west. Even between worlds, Sobek's kind were waiting.

His heartland was the Faiyum, a great oasis basin fed by a channel of the Nile, where a lake so large spread across the land that the Egyptians simply called it the Lake, pa-yom, the word from which the name Faiyum comes. The city on its shore, Shedet, was his capital, and there the crocodiles of the lake were honoured as his living images. The glory of Sobek reached its height under the kings of the Middle Kingdom, four thousand years ago, when the pharaohs drained and banked the Faiyum and made it the garden of Egypt. Amenemhat III, the mightiest king of the Twelfth Dynasty, raised his pyramid at Hawara beside the lake and built next to it a mortuary temple so vast, so full of courts and corridors, that the Greeks who saw it a thousand years later named it the Labyrinth and declared it greater than the pyramids themselves. The kings of the age took the god's name into their own: a line of pharaohs called Sobekhotep, Sobek is satisfied, ruled from the Delta, and when the Twelfth Dynasty failed, its last ruler was a woman, Sobekneferu, the Beauty of Sobek, who reigned as king in her own right. The Greeks who visited Shedet wrote home in amazement about the sacred crocodile kept in the temple lake, a tame and pampered beast that wore ornaments of gold on its ears, dined on bread and meat and wine from the priests, and was mummified like a nobleman when it died.

In myth, Sobek served the gods as fiercely as he served his appetites. The priests of the Faiyum told how, when Osiris, the murdered king of the afterlife, was cut to pieces by his brother Set, the god of chaos and the red desert, Sobek dived into the waters to gather the scattered limbs, and for this service the crocodile was honoured in the lake forever. In the New Kingdom, the age of empire, he was joined to Ra, the sun god, as Sobek-Ra, and the theologians of the Faiyum made him a creator in his own right. Their sacred book, called the Book of the Faiyum, pictured the lake itself as the last remnant of the primeval ocean and Sobek-Ra rising from it each morning as the sun, the crocodile who carries the disk of fire upon his back. He was fearsome in his loves as in his rages: one of his titles was He Who Eats While He Mates, and the Egyptians saw in the crocodile's hunger and heat the raw force of creation itself, unashamed and unstoppable.

His strangest temple stands at Kom Ombo, on a bend of the Nile south of Thebes, where crocodiles once hauled out to bask on the sandbanks below the cliffs. It is the only double temple in Egypt, built in the Greek period as two mirrored sanctuaries under one roof: one half for Sobek, the other half for Haroeris, the falcon-headed elder Horus, with twin entrances, twin halls, and twin holy of holies. Between them the priests measured the flood with a Nilometer, a stairwell descending to the river whose gauges told them the height of the year's water and so the size of the year's harvest and the year's taxes. On the temple's rear wall, carved in the Roman age, is a relief showing a set of surgical instruments, scalpels and probes and forceps, a hint that the house of the crocodile god, like the house of Sekhmet, was also a place of healing. In the catacombs nearby lay the mummies of crocodiles beyond counting, and a modern museum beside the temple now displays them, some longer than a fishing boat.

The Greeks and Romans took to Sobek with enthusiasm. Across the Faiyum new towns raised new temples to him under Greek names: Soknopaiou Nesos, the island of Soknopaios, which is Sobek Lord of the Island, where his temple stood at the edge of the desert and his priests kept records that still survive on papyrus; Bacchias, Philadelphia, Tebtunis, each with its own local form of the god, its own sacred crocodile, its own lake-side shrine. The cemeteries of these towns hold crocodile mummies in their thousands, from golden adults to hatchlings sealed in painted coffins, for every crocodile in the Faiyum was a small share of Sobek. When the temples closed before the rising tide of Christianity, the town of Soknopaiou Nesos was abandoned to the sand in the third century, its god's house left standing alone beyond the fields. The lake shrank, the pilgrims vanished, and the crocodiles themselves were hunted from the Egyptian Nile until none were left in the north where Shedet had been.

Yet Sobek was never wholly forgotten. His mummified subjects lie in the great museums of the world, his double temple at Kom Ombo is one of the most visited in Egypt, and his crocodile grin survives in films, games, and stories wherever the Nile is imagined. He remains what he always was: the water's teeth, the lake's hunger, the proof that the Egyptians did not worship a tamed nature but the living, dangerous thing itself, and knelt to it precisely because it could not be tamed.