You Gotta Love Blue Hippos

These pictures are from a Sotheby's sale catalogue. This little faience hippo was expected to fetch about $150,000. Well worth it, I say! These are usually found in grave contexts and nobody really knows what they were for because the Ancient Egyptians didn't write it down. They are only found during the Middle Kingdom. One theory is that the hippo, a dangerous animal, was made pleasant and cute in these miniatures in order to minimize the wild, natural dangers that this form would represent to the deceased in the afterlife -sort of an Egyptian answer to the Boggart-busting spell used by Harry Potter and friends. Another theory is that they were ritually de-leg-itated (their little legs were broken off) in a magical attempt to knobble the evil that might hurt the deceased in the afterlife. Some of them have been found with broken legs and some were apparently manufactured without legs. So, really, who knows. I think they are super-cute. So I might post more pictures of them. They look a lot like Gilligan.