The Was Sceptre first appears in the archaeological record during the First Dynasty of Egypt, around 3100 BCE, in the time of King Narmer, the unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt whose palette shows him smiting his enemies with a mace. The earliest sceptres were probably functional objects - shepherd's crooks, walking staffs, tent poles, or fighting canes - that acquired sacred meaning through their association with the gods and kings who carried them. By the Old Kingdom, the period of pyramid building that lasted from 2686 to 2181 BCE, the Was Sceptre had become firmly established as a symbol of divine kingship, and pharaohs, regarded as living gods, adopted it as part of their regalia to underscore their authority over both the earthly and spiritual realms.

The design of the Was Sceptre is unmistakable. It consists of a long straight shaft, a stylised animal head at the top, and a forked or bifurcated base. The animal head is usually identified with the Set animal, the mysterious long-snouted, big-eared creature associated with the god Set, though some representations show a jackal head linking the sceptre to Anubis. The forked base has been the subject of intense scholarly debate. The Egyptologists Calvin Schwabe, Joyce Adams, and Carleton Hodge proposed in 1982 that the Was, together with the ankh and the djed pillar, was derived from the anatomy of the bull, the most sacred animal in ancient Egypt. In their hypothesis, the ankh represents a thoracic vertebra, the djed the sacrum and lumbar vertebrae, and the Was the dried penis of the bull, a symbol of semen, life-force, and masculine power. Richard Lobban, an anthropologist, extended this theory in 1997 and 1999, arguing that the Was Sceptre originated in African bull cults and that its forked base represents the split tip of the organ. Whether or not this anatomical theory is correct, it captures something essential about the sceptre's meaning: it is a symbol of generative power, of the force that creates and sustains order.

The Was Sceptre is inseparable from the concept of ma'at, the divine order that balances chaos in Egyptian thought. Ma'at was not merely justice or truth but the very structure of the cosmos, the pattern that kept the sun rising, the Nile flooding, and the stars turning in their courses. The opposite of ma'at was isfet, chaos, disorder, and lies, embodied in the serpent Apep who tried each night to swallow the sun god Ra and plunge the world into eternal darkness. The Was Sceptre was the weapon and the guarantee of ma'at. In temple reliefs, the pharaoh is shown holding the Was in one hand and smiting foreign enemies or chaotic forces with the other, the staff a visible sign that his power came from the gods and was exercised on their behalf. In the Book of the Dead, the Was appears as one of the amulets placed with the deceased to ensure their power and protection in the afterlife, and in some depictions the forked base is shown pinning the head of a malevolent serpent, the sceptre literally crushing chaos beneath its feet.

The Was Sceptre enters written literature for the first time in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest known religious texts in the world, carved into the walls of the pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties at Saqqara between 2400 and 2300 BCE. In the Pyramid Texts of King Unas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, the Was appears in Utterance 254, where the text declares that "the Praise-serpent is on its scepter, the Tefnut of Unas, she who supports Shu." Tefnut and Shu are the first two gods born from the creator Atum, the goddess of moisture and the god of air, and their embrace holds up the sky. The Was Sceptre here is not merely a symbol of power but a cosmic pillar, the staff upon which the serpent of divine praise rests and through which the king connects heaven and earth. In other Pyramid Text utterances, the king is promised that his Was shall be at the head of the living and his staff at the head of the blessed dead, the sceptre thus bridging the two realms.

The Coffin Texts, which developed from the Pyramid Texts during the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom and were painted on the coffins of nobles and officials, expanded the Was Sceptre's role in the afterlife. In Coffin Text Spell 885, the grasping of a serpent or other threatening animal is described as a way for the deity or his priestly representative to exert mastery over dangerous forces, rendering them harmless to the holder but dangerous weapons against enemies. The Was Sceptre, sometimes depicted wrapped with a serpent, embodies this principle: the serpent around the staff is the benevolent power of the god, while the forked base pins the malevolent serpent of chaos to the ground. This duality - the same symbol representing both the power that heals and the power that destroys - is characteristic of Egyptian religious thought, where divine authority is always double-edged.

In the New Kingdom, from 1570 to 1069 BCE, the Was Sceptre became one of the most common motifs in temple and tomb art. At Karnak and Luxor, the great temple complexes of Thebes, gods and pharaohs are shown holding the Was in processions and rituals, the staff a constant presence in the visual language of power. The sceptre was often combined with the ankh and the djed in a single composite symbol, the three emblems together representing the totality of divine blessing: life, stability, and dominion. In the tomb of Tutankhamun, discovered by Howard Carter in 1922, a gilded wooden Was Sceptre was found among the king's funerary equipment, proof that even a boy king who reigned for only ten years was buried with the symbol of eternal power.

The Was Sceptre also had a linguistic life beyond its physical form. The hieroglyph was, a picture of the sceptre itself, was used to write the word for power and dominion, and it appears in royal titulary throughout Egyptian history. The city of Waset, the Egyptian name for Thebes and modern Luxor, derives its name from the same root, meaning "the Sceptre City" or "the City of Dominion." This linguistic connection reveals how deeply the symbol was woven into the fabric of Egyptian civilisation: the sceptre was not merely an object carried by kings but the name of the kingdom's greatest city, the word for power itself.