Discover Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god of the Nile and Faiyum, son of Neith, lord of Kom Ombo, whose sacred crocodiles wore gold. - Mythopouch Previous Egyptian Next > Sobek Name in Non-English, or Alternative Name/s sbk (Egyptian), Σοῦχος (Greek) Pronunciation SOH-bek Arthurian List Egyptian List Greek List Also known as, and/or Titles and Roles Sobk, Sebek, Sochet, Suchos, Sobek-Ra, Petesuchos, Soknopaios, the Great One of the Lake, Lord of the Water, He of the Pointed Teeth, the Rager, Son of Neith Mythopouch artistic interpretation Details Region Egyptian Regional Information Additional (if applicable) Ancient Egypt Category Deity Historicity (actuality or factual truth of persons, events, and claims) Mythological Gender Male Time Period c. 2500 BCE - 3rd century CE Symbol Sobek Head Tags egyptian, sobek, crocodile, faiyum, kom-ombo, nile, sobek-ra, neith Introduction - Overview Sobek is the crocodile god of Egypt, the living terror of the Nile raised to divinity, the deity of the water's danger and the water's gift. He is the lord of the Faiyum, the vast green lake country west of the Nile, where his city of Shedet was so full of sacred crocodiles that the Greeks called it Crocodilopolis, the crocodile city, and where travellers marvelled at a tame temple crocodile that wore earrings of gold and crystal and took cakes and wine from the hands of tourists. He is the son of Neith, the ancient goddess of war and the loom, and the power that kings invoked for strength, whose name was carried by a dynasty of Sobekhotep pharaohs and by Sobekneferu, the first woman to rule Egypt as a full king. He is the god of the double temple of Kom Ombo, the only sanctuary in Egypt built for two gods at once, which he shared with Horus the Elder. And he is the patron of thousands upon thousands of mummified crocodiles, from hatchlings the length of a finger to ancient monsters, wrapped in linen and buried with the honours of princes. Gallery Other depictions of Sobek as a crocodile. Main Article - Who or What was... Sobek 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. Summary Sobek endures as the crocodile made god, the fierce generosity of the Nile given a green back and open jaws. From the primeval waters of his birth to the gold-eared pet of Crocodilopolis, from the Labyrinth of Amenemhat III to the mirrored halls of Kom Ombo, he spans nearly three thousand years of prayer and fear. Modern scanners have revealed one last secret of his priests: when adult crocodiles grew scarce, they wrapped hatchlings and even clutches of eggs to look like full-grown sacred mummies, so that no pilgrim's offering would go unanswered. In the human imagination, Sobek remains the old hunger in the river, the god you worship so that he eats someone else. Now enter the Mythopouch World! You’ve discovered: Sobek From Myth to Game Join to access FREE real-world mythology "Learn Quests" and "Courses". Sign up to the newsletter for new releases, game updates, insider news, and more as Mythopouch brings real mythology to life. EARN the right to purchase an offline board game by completing FREE modules. JOIN THE NEWSLETTER! Email* Join Our Mailing List I want to subscribe to your mailing list. It's FREE to join as a MEMBER! Log In Not ready to join? Get the newsletter instead below Related Entries Neith Deity Neith Ra Deity Ra Horus Deity Horus Set Deity Set Osiris Deity Osiris Looking for others? Click into the field below to search, or click the icon to go to full page search function! Search Looking for Mythology Insights? The House Was a Battlefield: Ancient Egyptian Protective Deities Ancient Egyptian Protective Deities did not live only in temples. Bes, Beset and Taweret stood at the head of the bed, on the birth wand and at the doorway, ugly and hybrid on purpose so that worse things stayed outside. This Mythopouch insight looks at the household trio and the same habit of hiring fright as a guard in other cultures, from Pazuzu to the gargoyle. They Can Lie: the Nine Muses The nine Muses are not only pretty sisters who hand out songs. This Mythopouch insight goes past the tidy list of arts to the harder claim in Hesiod: their mother is Memory, they can speak false things that look true, and the number nine was not always fixed. Learn what the mountain actually gives, and what it can still take back. The Potion Did Not Invent the Love: Tristan and Isolde Tristan and Isolde did not begin as a Round Table romance. This Mythopouch insight goes past the dragon, the cup and the black sail to ask what the legend is really testing: kinship, accident, and the choice that remains when the potion is no longer an excuse. Click below to view our mythology blog article insights, where we delve into the current Mythopouch Tier regions, and what we think you should know! Sources & Retellings Explore the original mythological Source texts (most from over 75 years ago, some as translated, possibly with mature content ) and Mythopouch's source Retellings (a modern retelling also suitable for 15+ ) connected to this mythological entity. We are growing this resource and will link these in the future; for now, check the References below, then find the Sources or Retellings on those pages! Source Texts List Source Retellings List References Validation References: - Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom, c. 2055-1650 BCE) - Sobek as son of Neith and lord of the waters - Works and inscriptions of Amenemhat III at Hawara and the Faiyum (12th Dynasty, c. 1860-1814 BCE) - the Labyrinth and the reclamation of the lake country - Herodotus, The Histories, Book II (c. 440 BCE) - the sacred crocodile of Crocodilopolis and the wonders of the Labyrinth - Strabo, Geography, Book XVII (c. 20 BCE) - the Faiyum, the Labyrinth, and the feeding of the sacred crocodile Suchos - Papyrus Jumilhac (Ptolemaic period, c. 300 BCE) - Sobek's role in gathering the limbs of Osiris - Temple of Kom Ombo, inscriptions and crocodile catacombs (Ptolemaic-Roman, c. 180 BCE - 250 CE) - the double cult of Sobek and Haroeris, the Nilometer, and the surgical relief - Marco Zecchi, Sobek of Shedet: The Crocodile God in the Fayyum in the Dynastic Period (Tauris, 2010) - the cult of Sobek in the Faiyum - Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (Thames & Hudson, 2003) - Sobek's iconography, mythology, and fusion with Ra Cultural Context Notice Mythology developed across different cultures, periods and traditions, and there is rarely one universally accepted version of a story. Mythopouch approaches these traditions with respect while remaining faithful to the complexity of the surviving material. Retellings and educational content may interpret or adapt historical sources, but are not presented as definitive accounts of any culture, religion or belief system. Previous --- End of Record --- Next >

Explore Pelops, son of Tantalus who survived a divine feast, won Hippodamia in a sabotaged chariot race and became ancestor of the cursed Greek House of Atreus. Previous Greek Next > Pelops Name in Non-English, or Alternative Name/s Πέλοψ (Pélops) Pronunciation PEE-lops Arthurian List Egyptian List Greek List Also known as, and/or Titles and Roles The Dark-Shouldered, The Son of Tantalus, The Founder of the Peloponnese, The Chariot Victor, The Cursed Ancestor, The Father of Atreus, The King of Pisa Mythopouch artistic interpretation Details Region Greek Regional Information Additional (if applicable) Category Person Historicity (actuality or factual truth of persons, events, and claims) Legendary Gender Male Time Period c. 8th century BCE (literary attestation) Symbol Chariot, Sword & Crown Tags greek, pelops, person, tantalus, oenomaus, hippodamia, myrtilus, atreus, thyestes, olympic-games Introduction - Overview Pelops is the dark-shouldered king whose name gave the Peloponnese to the Greeks, the son of Tantalus who survived his father's cannibal feast and won a kingdom by treachery in a chariot race that killed a god's son. He is the Phrygian prince who came to Greece as an exile, bringing with him the wealth of Asia and the curse of a family that had already offended the gods beyond forgiveness. He is the suitor who defeated Oenomaus, the king of Pisa who murdered eighteen young men rather than give his daughter away, by bribing the king's charioteer to sabotage the divine car with wax linchpins. He is the husband of Hippodamia, the princess whose hand he won with blood, and the father of Atreus and Thyestes, the brothers whose feud of adultery, cannibalism, and revenge would curse the next three generations of his house. And he is the founder of the Olympic Games, the victor who established the greatest athletic festival in the ancient world upon the grave of the man he had murdered by proxy, a monument to his own triumph that concealed the treachery beneath it. Gallery Main Article - Who or What was... Pelops Pelops was born in Lydia, the wealthy kingdom in Asia Minor whose capital was Sardis, the son of Tantalus, the king who had once been a favourite of the gods and had lost everything through hubris, the dangerous pride that leads mortals to challenge the gods. Tantalus had murdered his own son Pelops, carved his body, and served him to the gods at a feast to test their omniscience. The gods knew immediately what they were eating. Demeter, the goddess of the grain, who was grieving the loss of her daughter Persephone to the underworld, absent-mindedly ate a piece of the shoulder before she realised what it was. The other gods were horrified, and they restored Pelops to life by gathering his body parts from the cauldron and replacing his missing shoulder with one carved of ivory, the only substance that could match the perfection of the original. Tantalus was punished with eternal thirst and hunger in Tartarus, the dark pit beneath the world, and Pelops, marked by his ivory shoulder and his father's crime, grew to manhood in a kingdom that would never forget his family's shame. When Pelops came of age, he left Lydia and travelled westward across the Aegean Sea to Greece, bringing with him the wealth of Asia and the ambition to found a new kingdom. He was handsome, cunning, and ruthless, a man who understood that the world belonged to those who took it. He landed in the northwestern Peloponnese and made his way to Pisa, the city in Elis where King Oenomaus, the son of Ares, the god of war, ruled with a chariot and a spear and a terror that had already killed eighteen suitors. Oenomaus had a daughter, Hippodamia, and he had sworn that no man would marry her. The suitors who tried were forced into a chariot race: they would drive away with Hippodamia, and Oenomaus would pursue them in his divine car, drawn by horses that were a gift from Ares. If the king caught the suitor, he killed him with a spear through the back. Eighteen heads adorned the pillars of Oenomaus's palace, and Pelops, hearing the story, saw not a warning but an opportunity. He approached Myrtilus, the charioteer of Oenomaus, who was also the son of Hermes, the messenger god. Pelops offered him a bargain: sabotage the king's chariot, and receive half the kingdom and one night with Hippodamia. Myrtilus, tempted by the prize, agreed. He removed the bronze linchpins that held the wheels of Oenomaus's chariot to the axle and replaced them with pins of wax. On the day of the race, Pelops drove away with Hippodamia, and Oenomaus pursued in his sabotaged car. The king's horses were faster, as always, but as the chariot heated with speed, the wax pins melted. The wheels came loose, the car collapsed, and Oenomaus was thrown from it and caught in the reins. His own divine horses dragged him across the rocks of the plain until his body was torn to pieces, and he died cursing the charioteer who had betrayed him. Pelops crossed the finish line, married Hippodamia, and claimed the throne of Pisa. But Pelops did not honour his bargain with Myrtilus. When the charioteer came to collect his reward, Pelops accused him of trying to rape Hippodamia, or simply declared that a traitor deserved no payment, and he threw Myrtilus from a cliff into the sea below. As Myrtilus fell, he cursed Pelops and all his descendants, and the curse took root in the blood of the house. Pelops and Hippodamia had many children, but the most important were Atreus and Thyestes, the twin seeds of destruction. Atreus became king of Mycenae, and Thyestes coveted his brother's throne. Their feud produced the most terrible crimes in Greek mythology: Thyestes seduced Atreus's wife and stole the golden fleece of the lamb that signified royal power; Atreus killed Thyestes's children and served them to their father at a feast; Thyestes raped his own daughter to beget a son who would avenge him; and the curse continued through Agamemnon and Menelaus, the sons of Atreus, and through Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, until it finally burned itself out in blood and madness. Pelops himself was not destroyed by the curse in his lifetime. He ruled Pisa wisely, or at least successfully, and he founded the Olympic Games beside the tomb of Oenomaus, establishing the athletic contests that would be held every four years for more than a thousand years. The games were a celebration of his victory and a propitiation of the dead king's ghost, a combination of triumph and guilt that characterised Pelops's whole life. When he died, he was buried at Olympia, and his tomb became one of the most sacred sites in the sanctuary. The Greeks called the whole peninsula the Peloponnese, the island of Pelops, and every city-state that rose within its borders traced its origin back to one of his sons or grandsons. He was the founding father of the Greek mainland, the immigrant from Asia who became the ancestor of the greatest heroes and the greatest tragedies the world had ever known. Summary Pelops endures as the founding father of the Peloponnese, the dark-shouldered king who survived a cannibal feast, won a kingdom by treachery, and condemned his descendants to four generations of tragedy. From the ivory shoulder given by Demeter to the wax linchpins that killed Oenomaus, from the Olympic Games founded on a murderer's grave to the curse that destroyed Atreus and Thyestes, his story is one of ambition that outruns honour. A detail worth remembering: the Greeks named their greatest peninsula after a man who was a fratricide's son, a chariot-race cheat, and a promise-breaker, and in that naming they acknowledged that the greatest civilisations are often built by men who would not pass their own laws. Now enter the Mythopouch World! You’ve discovered: Pelops From Myth to Game Join to access FREE real-world mythology "Learn Quests" and "Courses". Sign up to the newsletter for new releases, game updates, insider news, and more as Mythopouch brings real mythology to life. EARN the right to purchase an offline board game by completing FREE modules. JOIN THE NEWSLETTER! Email* Join Our Mailing List I want to subscribe to your mailing list. It's FREE to join as a MEMBER! Log In Not ready to join? Get the newsletter instead below Related Entries Atreus Person Atreus Hippodamia Person Hippodamia Myrtilus Person Myrtilus Oenomaus Person Oenomaus Looking for others? Click into the field below to search, or click the icon to go to full page search function! Search Looking for Mythology Insights? The House Was a Battlefield: Ancient Egyptian Protective Deities Ancient Egyptian Protective Deities did not live only in temples. Bes, Beset and Taweret stood at the head of the bed, on the birth wand and at the doorway, ugly and hybrid on purpose so that worse things stayed outside. This Mythopouch insight looks at the household trio and the same habit of hiring fright as a guard in other cultures, from Pazuzu to the gargoyle. They Can Lie: the Nine Muses The nine Muses are not only pretty sisters who hand out songs. This Mythopouch insight goes past the tidy list of arts to the harder claim in Hesiod: their mother is Memory, they can speak false things that look true, and the number nine was not always fixed. Learn what the mountain actually gives, and what it can still take back. The Potion Did Not Invent the Love: Tristan and Isolde Tristan and Isolde did not begin as a Round Table romance. This Mythopouch insight goes past the dragon, the cup and the black sail to ask what the legend is really testing: kinship, accident, and the choice that remains when the potion is no longer an excuse. Click below to view our mythology blog article insights, where we delve into the current Mythopouch Tier regions, and what we think you should know! Sources & Retellings Explore the original mythological Source texts (most from over 75 years ago, some as translated, possibly with mature content ) and Mythopouch's source Retellings (a modern retelling also suitable for 15+ ) connected to this mythological entity. We are growing this resource and will link these in the future; for now, check the References below, then find the Sources or Retellings on those pages! Source Texts List Source Retellings List References Validation References: - Pindar, Olympian Ode 1.37-93 (c. 476 BCE) - primary poetic account of Pelops's chariot victory and the founding of the Olympic Games - Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, Epitome 2.3-9 (1st-2nd century CE) - Pelops's restoration by the gods, the race against Oenomaus, and the murder of Myrtilus - Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, Book 4.73.1-7 (c. 1st century BCE) - the chariot race and Pelops's curse - Hyginus, Fabulae 82-84 (c. 2nd century CE) - Tantalus's feast, Pelops's ivory shoulder, and the curse upon the house - Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book 5.13.1-7, 6.20.17 (c. 150 CE) - the tomb of Pelops at Olympia and local traditions - Euripides, Orestes, lines 4-11, 995-1012 (c. 408 BCE) - the curse of the house of Atreus and its origin in Pelops's crimes - Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) - comprehensive analysis of the Pelops tradition - Francis Vian, Les origines de Thebes: Cadmos et les Spartes (Klincksieck, 1963) - scholarly study of the Pelops myth and the chariot race Cultural Context Notice Mythology developed across different cultures, periods and traditions, and there is rarely one universally accepted version of a story. Mythopouch approaches these traditions with respect while remaining faithful to the complexity of the surviving material. Retellings and educational content may interpret or adapt historical sources, but are not presented as definitive accounts of any culture, religion or belief system. Previous --- End of Record --- Next >

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