Ancient Egyptian bestiary: Reptiles

Printout
For best results save the whole webpage (pictures included) onto your hard disk, open the page with Word 97 or higher, edit if necessary and print.
Printing using the browser's print function is not recommended.

Reptiles

Lizard and quail
Source: W.S.Smith, Country Life in Ancient Egypt, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Egyptians' attitude toward reptilians was more ambivalent than toward any other animal class. Crocodiles and many snake species (cobras, vipers) are highly dangerous, and were therefore, like most wild animals, often connected with the chaotic realm of Seth. On the other hand their destructive power was frequently invoked in the defence of humans and their institutions.
Turtles and tortoises, while not very dangerous to man, were prevented from hurting the sun by magical formulas.
Lizards and geckos were in reality even more inoccuous, though as ingredients in spells they could prove deadly:

You put a two-tailed lizard into the oil and [cook] it, and anoint the man with it; then [he dies(?)].

You wish to produce a skin-disease on a man and that it shall not be healed, a hantous-lizard[and (?)] a hafleele-lizard, you cook them with [oil (?)], you wash the man with them.
Demotic Magical Papyrus

Lizards were generally not preserved. Only at Lisht have monitor and other lizards been found in great numbers interred in jars dating from the Roman period.^[1] Chameleons were occasionally represented.

[1] Geraldine Pinch Magic in Ancient Egypt, 1995 University of Texas Press, p.80