Bes

He has no temple. He has no priests. He is one of the most popular gods in Egyptian history.

Bes is a dwarf with the mane of a lion, bow-legged, broad-faced, with his tongue sticking out. He is carved onto beds and headrests. He appears on mirrors, kohl containers, perfume vessels, and birth bricks. Women tattooed his image on their inner thighs. He is one of the only Egyptian deities shown facing forward instead of in profile, because his job is not to be admired from the side. His job is to stare down whatever is coming at you.

The Face

Almost all Egyptian art depicts figures in profile. Bes breaks this rule. He faces the viewer directly: flat nose, protruding brow, thick curling beard, and tongue thrust out in a gesture that is universal in its meaning. The direct gaze is apotropaic. It confronts. Combined with his grotesque features, the frontal face works as a mask, designed to shock evil spirits into retreat.

Actual Bes masks existed. New Kingdom performers wore them in ritual dances. The Greek Gorgoneion, the frontal Medusa face placed on shields and temples, served the same function across the Mediterranean. The grotesque face that stares back protects because it refuses to look away.

James Romano, in his 1989 NYU dissertation The Bes-Image in Pharaonic Egypt, argued that “Bes” is not a single deity but an iconographic type: a category of protective images. The Bes-image, he proposed, derived from the upright rearing lion, which developed into a lion-man and only later acquired its dwarfish physique. Richard Wilkinson identified nine similar deities sharing the same role and appearance: Aha (“the fighter”), Amam, Hayet, Ihty, Mefdjet, Menew, Segeb, Sopdu, and Tetetenu. The Ptolemaic Bes may be a composite of all ten, their identities merged over centuries into a single face sticking out a single tongue.

What He Protected

Everything vulnerable.

Bes protected bedrooms. His image was carved onto beds and headrests, where sleepers were exposed to nightmares, evil spirits, and the creatures that hunt in the dark. Spell 166 of the Book of the Dead states that a headrest protects against decapitation. Drawing Bes on a child’s left hand and wrapping it in temple-blessed cloth ensured pleasant dreams.

He protected mothers in childbirth. At Deir el-Medina, the workers’ village in the Theban necropolis where the men who built the royal tombs lived with their families, Bes and the hippopotamus goddess Taweret were the two most popular gods. Rosalie David documented their dominance in domestic worship. Bes appeared on the walls of houses, on furniture, on the birth bricks where women knelt to deliver their children. In 2001, Josef Wegner of the University of Pennsylvania discovered the first actual birth brick at South Abydos: an unfired mud-brick from around 1750-1700 BCE, painted with a mother, her newborn, and protective deities in the same visual language as the apotropaic wands.

Those wands are older still. Approximately 175 Middle Kingdom ivory wands, carved from hippopotamus tusks, survive in collections from the Metropolitan Museum to the British Museum. They show a dwarf figure called Aha (“the fighter”) brandishing knives and grasping serpents. Aha became Bes. The fighter became the protector. The function never changed.

The Mug

In 2024, Davide Tanasi of the University of South Florida published results in Nature’s Scientific Reports that connected Bes to two plants already documented on this site.

The team analyzed a 2,200-year-old Bes-shaped ceramic mug held by the Tampa Museum of Art, donated in 1984. Using proteomics, metabolomics, and genetics, they identified the contents: Peganum harmala (Syrian rue) and Nymphaea caerulea (blue lotus), both psychoactive. The mug also contained human blood, breast milk, and possible vaginal secretions. The liquid was flavored with honey, sesame seeds, pine nuts, licorice, and grapes dyed to look like blood.

The researchers connected the mug to the Bes Chambers at Saqqara, rooms in the Anubeion decorated with terracotta reliefs of Bes, where pilgrims slept to receive divinely inspired dreams. Women seeking pregnancy confirmation or fertility used these chambers for incubation: ritual sleep in which the god communicates through dreams. The mug’s contents, combining MAO-inhibiting harmine from Syrian rue with the apomorphine and nuciferine of blue lotus, would have produced vivid altered states. The blood and bodily fluids may have functioned as sympathetic magic, binding the dreamer to the life-giving forces the ritual invoked.

The same molecule that Vedic priests may have consumed as Soma, that Iranian grandmothers burn against the evil eye, was being mixed into a dwarf god’s cup in Ptolemaic Egypt, flavored with honey and drunk before sleep in a chamber covered in images of a tongue-sticking-out deity who protected mothers and their children.

Beyond Egypt

Bes traveled further than almost any Egyptian deity.

The Phoenicians adopted him as Pataikos (“little Ptah”) and carried him across the Mediterranean on their trade routes. Herodotus noted that the Phoenicians displayed Pataikoi as talismans on the prows of their ships. Bes amulets and figurines have been found at Phoenician and Punic sites from Cyprus to Sardinia to North Africa.

The Phoenicians named an island after him. Their word for Ibiza was Ybshm or Iboshim: “the Island of God Bes.” Coins minted on the island in the early 3rd century BCE depict Bes with the inscription IBSM. Over 2,000 votive terracotta Bes figures have been excavated there. The party island of the modern Mediterranean carries the name of an Egyptian dwarf god who protected childbirth.

In the Greco-Roman period, Bes reached his maximum form. Bes pantheios, the “all-gods Bes,” absorbed attributes from across the Egyptian pantheon: ram horns of Amun, falcon wings of Horus, snakes of various underworld deities. A bronze Bes pantheios at the Walters Art Museum (3rd-2nd century BCE) has four arms, two pairs of wings, and the body of Horus the Child. The dwarf who started as a bedroom guardian became a universal protector.

At Abydos, in the Temple of Seti I, an Oracle of Bes drew international visitors in Late Antiquity. One visitor described Bes as “all-truthful, dream-giver and oracle-giver, sincere, invoked throughout the whole world, celestial God.” Emperor Constantius II closed the oracle around 359 CE. By the 6th century, Christian monks remembered Bes as a demon vanquished by the holy man Apa Moses of Abydos.

What Survives

The amulets survive. Bes amulets were produced for over two thousand years in faience, stone, bone, ivory, bronze, and gold. They are among the most common Egyptian artifacts in museum collections worldwide. The Metropolitan Museum holds the colossal limestone head of a Bes-image from Tell Basta (Ptolemaic period, Gallery 131), 39.5 centimeters high, 74.4 kilograms of grotesque stone protection.

The tattooed mummy survives. The birth brick survives. The Bes mug at the Tampa Museum of Art survives, still carrying traces of the drink that was poured into it when Ptolemaic Egypt was a living civilization and mothers slept in chambers covered in images of the ugliest, most beloved god in the Egyptian pantheon, waiting for the dream that would tell them they were going to be fine.

He had no temple. He had no priests. He was everywhere people were most afraid: in the bedroom, in the birth chamber, on the body of the woman in labor. The gods with temples and priests were for the state. Bes was for the family. He stared forward with his tongue out, and whatever was coming for the people he protected had to get past that face first.