Sobek & The Mythological Mountain of The Horizon
And how I painted it
A new quick-but-deep journey throughout the Egyptian pantheon!
On the banks of river Nile, a crocodile hides, and for the ancients Egyptians, is a powerful God called ‘Sobek’
The Egyptians believed they often sighted Sobek near the swamps and on the banks of rivers.
Precisely for this reason, he was greatly venerated in the swampy oasis of Fayum, in Lower Egypt. (See image above).
There, his cult had a remarkable development during the entire Middle Kingdom, and numerous rulers brought a name compounded with that of the god.
At least nine rulers of the Thirteenth Dynasty adopted the name Sobekhotep which means “Sobek is at/in peace”
The temple of Medinet Madi dates back to this period and is the only one of the Middle Kingdom to have been preserved; dedicated to him and to the goddess Renenutet.
The remains of the temple reported rooms of a crocodile farm, which attests to a very widespread votive practice in the Late Period and in the Ptolemaic Period, i.e. the sale of mummified crocodiles by the temple to the devotees, to be dedicated to the god as a ex-voto.
Other important places of worship were KomOmbo, Gebel el-Silsilah and Gebelein.
Sobek was also called “Lord of Bakhu”, the mythological mountain of the horizon, on which there seemed to be a temple dedicated to him entirely made of carnelian, and that’s the element that “functioned” as the background within the composition of my painting, but instead of the mountain, i made pyramids, as the vanishing point of the background itself.
Also, similarly to all the other Egyptian deities, Sobek often appears as a man with the head of a crocodile, as a crocodile on his naos or, again, as a crocodile wrapped in a shroud from which only the head protrudes, so I opted for a neutral representation of the subject, inspired by the statuary one.
The lower part of my painting’s composition is an inverted architectural element; some aisles of an arcade composing the Sobek spill element.
This element represents secret passages, idealistic passages that allow the visitor of the sacred waterway to visit the marshy environments without annoying the silent crocodile, ready to devour anyone who disturbs it.
This type of symbolic use of architectural elements is the result, also, of my studies of the metaphysical art of Giorgio DeChirico.
Sobek, later became a primordial deity and a creator god, object of great popular veneration, as confirmed by the numerous apotropaic amulets bearing his image, attested throughout the entire pharaonic history.
The cult of him was connected to that of Amun, Osiris and, above all, to that of “Sobek-Rha”.
This latter association led the Greeks to identify him with their own sun god, Helios.
