ways.
Their ultimate form is human, the god is a man or woman, and as the
human figures of all the deities are drawn after one conventional
male and one conventional female pattern, a symbol is added to the
head to show which god or goddess is meant. Hathor is a woman with a
cow's horns on her head, Seb has a duck on his head, and so on. But
an earlier form of the written symbols of the deities is that which
represents them partly in human and partly in animal form. Horus
appears as a man with the head of a hawk, Hathor as a woman with the
head and horns of a cow, Bast is a woman with the head of a cat,
Osiris has the head of a bull or of an ibis, Chnum of a ram, Amon has
the head now of a ram now of a hawk. Deities also occur with human
bodies and the heads of mythical animals such as the phoenix. But
along with these semi-human, semi-animal figures there are found
still simpler symbols for the deities; they are drawn as animals. It
is only about the twelfth dynasty that the change to the higher form
takes place, but even after the step was made of representing the
gods as half-human, the older pictures of them were not discarded,
but placed side by side with the new ones. Thus we find on the same
stone two representations of Horus, one of which gives him as a man
with a hawk's head, while the other makes him simply a hawk; and
similar double representations of the other gods occur. If the gods
of Egypt were thus conceived and represented in the earliest times,
then the animal worship described by the Greek and Roman writers was
not the invention of a late age of decadence, but had its roots at
least far back in the past. The early gods of Egypt were animals,
whatever else, whatever more they were. It may be that the animal
worship of the later and weaker Egyptian periods was a revival, such
as takes place in weak periods, of a style of worship which in
earlier centuries had to a large extent disappeared in favour of a
more spiritual faith.[2] Of this only an Egyptologist can judge, but
at any rate animal worship was not a new thing in Egypt, but a very
old thing.

[Footnote 2: This is held by Le Page Renouf, in his Hibbert Lectures,
_On the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religion
of Ancient Egypt_.]

Theories Accounting for Animal Worship.--What did this worship mean?
and how are we to account for it? The Egyptians themselves, and the
ancient writers who turned their attention to Egypt, accou