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...
My own personal guess "I cannot see anything" may mean "blind". door could be a choice of brothel rooms. so basically
"A blind 'dog' enters a brothel and asks, which hooker should I take?"
Glad to see it as top comment. Recognition for the classics means there's still hope for humanity yet.
Set was the god of Libya and was at war with the "good guy gods" in Egypt, so one has to assume the civilization based in Libya would be were we could correlate the answer -- and we have the contention that the Sahara has grown since the early days of Egypt, so its possible the definitive answer remains buried.
With regard to differences that could be explained by stylisation and the lack of familiarity due to it's rarity in most of Egypt.
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.
> ...Aardvarks, which the Egyptians could plausibly have encountered on their trading trips farther south into Africa.
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.
Unless you invent a time machine of course.
The value of a 'mystery head' may actually indeed have been the intention of the original artists. A '*'-char for Ra.
Show it to a biologist or naturalist (and without the horrendous dark blue background behind the black head – didn't anyone look at the article before it was published?!), and the first response would probably be: "aardvark!" (or possibly "anteater!").
The aardvark's range covers much of the African continent; conceivably, it could have extended to Egypt, several thousand years ago.
EDIT: also, wrong tail.
the Set animal has a snout that is more bird/reptile-like. the ears are a cipher.
A serpent guard, a Horus guard, and a Setesh guard meet on a neutral planet. It is a tense moment. The serpent guard's eyes glow. The Horus guard's beak glistens. The Setesh guard's... nose drips.