As the older Babylonian joke says[0]:

A dog enters a bar. He doesn't see anything, so he says "shall I open this door?"

(the combination of an article about a mysterious aspect of such a well known ancient god and your joke made me think of this mysterious Babylonian joke, recorded from 1700 BCE but whose meaning we can only theorize about)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke#First_recorded_exampl...

Too funny.... All I could literally think about while reading the article was the Goa'uld saying "Jaffa Kree!" Maybe I will give it another year of senility and watch it all over again... should have forgotten everything by then.

Indeed

Aardvark to me. Similar snout, long ears. They were probably in the southern reaches of Egypt.

With regard to differences that could be explained by stylisation and the lack of familiarity due to it's rarity in most of Egypt.

If experts have disagreed about it for longer than you’ve been alive it seems like arrogance to say it’s pretty clearly anything.

They already had a jackal god in Anubis which is represented without the weird down slopping snout and squared ears.

From the article, "Egypt was conquered several times by foreign nations that the Egyptians perceived as worshiping Set."

So while the Egyptians might have seen Set as the god of Libya, the Libyan representations might not be the one that Egyptians were comparing to.

Could be a combination of stuff too like a birds beak shoved on a cat shoved on a human body.

There is no evidence Aardvarks in egypt at that time. I think we'd probably expect at least a few aardvark bones if it was.

Yeah, I'm a fan of Egyptian mythology and enjoyed reading it, for one moment I thought the article would present some new evidence/findings to settle the debate, unfortunately that's not the case

NGL, the quote below was a nice way to end the article giving all the data we have though

> So we may not know for sure what the Set animal is, [...] And maybe that’s exactly how a god of chaos within an ordered world would want it to be.

The great thing about history is that there can only be conjectures, never conclusions.

Unless you invent a time machine of course.

I believe it is best left to fantasy now anyway, personally.. Set is indeed a random seed; may as well be "an alien races head" as anything else, given the actual utility of Set, contextually, in the dogma. '?'-Set is fine by me.

The value of a 'mystery head' may actually indeed have been the intention of the original artists. A '*'-char for Ra.