From the Antechamber to the Tomb of Tutankhamun comes this hippopotamus head, one of a pair from the ritual couch of Ammit, the "gobbler of the dead." Her head and body are of gilded wood, her teeth of ivory, her tongue of pink-stained ivory, her eyes of translucent quartz and black glass.

When, on November 26, 1922, Howard Carter first punched a hole into the Antechamber of Tutankhamun's tomb and shone his candle into it, there emerged from the darkness (he later wrote) ''.... strange animals, statues and gold - everywhere the glint of gold." But at the time, when Lord Carnarvon asked him what he saw, Carter could only stammer: "Wonderful things!"

Years later Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, tried to recreate the excitement of the opening of that first room: "Some of the objects, highlighted in the gloom by the flashing beams of their lights, terrified the searchers. On the long western wall of the rectangular room, directly opposite the door, were three phantasmagorical couches. The group had been aware of them all the while, but had not quite believed they were there. The sides of the gilded couches were carved into monstrous animals, attenuated in form. They were startling, realistic, yet unreal at the same time: strange beasts - a lion; a cow; a Typhon, part hippo, part crocodile. Their brilliant surfaces were plucked out of the darkness by the excavators' lamps, as though by limelight, their heads throwing grotesque, distorted, wildly gyrating shadows on the wall of the silent tomb, making the beasts seem to move as if they had suddenly come to life. "

Below you see the goddess Ammit as she usually appears, with a crocodile head, a lion body, and a hippopotamus bottom. This painting is from the Book of the Dead in the Papyrus of Nebqed, 18th Dynasty. The box with the wavy lines above Ammit perhaps indicates the Nile, or the underworld river, where she lurks, ready to devour the hearts of all who fail to tell the truth in their Negative Confession, in the lie-detector test of the Weighing of the Heart in the Hall of Maat, goddess of Truth and Justice. Standing behind Ammit is the Feather of Maat, against which the heart of the deceased was weighed on a great scale by the jackal-headed god Anubis. If you failed the test, sinking with the weight of your sins and lies below her feather in the opposite pan, your heart was thrown to Ammit, who gobbled it up and destroyed you forever. In Egypt, there was no Hell where the wicked were eternally punished. They simply perished - forever. So which do you think is worse: to suffer for all eternity, or to cease to exist? Either the ancient Egyptians thought the latter was worse, or they didn't even think of the former.

To see Ammit at the Weighing of the Heart in the Hall of Maat, sitting up like a dog waiting for a scrap to be tossed from the table, click HERE

So why was Ammit carved on one of Tutankhamun's funeral couches? Was she there just to terrify tomb robbers? Or, along with the lion-goddess and the cow-goddess on the other two couches, was she put there to protect him during his journey into the Afterlife? If he should encounter there some evil spirit or demon that threatened him, would she gobble it up?



Sources :
The Howard Carter quote is from his book, "The Tomb of Tutankhamen," Excalibur Books reprint, 1972, p 47.
The Thomas Hoving quote is from his book, "Tutankhamun. The Untold Story" (NY: Simon & Schuster 1978), p 93.
The photo of Ammit's hippo head on the couch from Tutankhamun's tomb is by Araldo De Luca, from T.G.H. James, "Tutankhamun " (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2002) p.140.
The Ammit painting image, from the Louvre Musem, is from Nebqed's Book of the Dead is from Lucia Gahlin, "Egypt. Gods, Myths and Religion" (NY: Barnes & Noble, 2002), p.144.