The Fiery Serpent: The Egyptian Cobra in Southern Levantine Iconography and Literature, c. 1800–322 BCE

The cobra is not native to the southern Levant. Nevertheless, the motif of the “uraeus”—the upright Egyptian cobra—became a standard piece of the southern Levantine iconographic repertoire for a millennium and has been immortalized in texts from Herodotus and the Hebrew Bible. At its core, this poster tells its story: Iconographically, how a foreign theriomorphic motif reached the region via Egyptian colonialism in the Middle Bronze Age II (ca. 1800–1700 BCE); how it became so localized that its popularity in the region outlived Egyptian colonial rule (the Late Bronze Age, ca. 1600–1150 BCE) by several centuries; how its death within the region’s glyptic was precipitated by the arrival of new foreign hegemons—the Neo-Assyrian empire in the late 8th century BCE—whose alteration of local power structures and the resettlement of Mesopotamian populations in the region shifted iconographic trends away from the Nile and towards the Euphrates.

At the same time, it presents how the earliest texts of the Hebrew Bible come from exactly this and ensuring periods and maintain a preoccupation with the southern Levant’s intimate historical relationship with Egypt (through especially the exodus tradition). The uraeus appears at three significant points in the biblical texts that reckon with the southern Levant’s place between the great powers of Egypt and Assyria: A prophecy of Isaiah (6:2–11) well-dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE displays the mixed responses to Assyria’s arrival in the region (Isa 6–8) and depicts cobras, here called the “seraphim,” as a completely local(ized) motif within the Jerusalem temple. In the main biblical narrative, Moses’s construction of a bronze cobra mounted on a pole, the so-called “Nehushtan,” is connected with the departure from Egypt (Num 21:4–9) and its destruction with the arrival of the Assyrians (2 Kgs 18:4).

In this way, the story of the uraeus reveals the various ways that southern Levantines adopted, adapted, maintained, and reacted to elements of culture from New Kingdom Egypt and the Neo-Assyrian empire. Since it is, for most of its timespan, a story of iconography rather than literature, the subject matter lends itself toward presentation in visual media. The poster will progress through the region’s iconographic trends from the MB II/III to the peaks of the uraeus’s popularity in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages and into the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods (ca. 587–332 BCE), when the uraeus becomes so schematic it is hardly recognizable as such. The poster will focus on changes in the Levantine glyptic but also feature other examples, objects found mainly in cultic contexts. As both major appearances of the uraeus in the Hebrew Bible (as the seraphim and the Nehushtan) have direct correlations in the material culture, discussion of the biblical texts will be handled in dedicated text boxes that “annotate” the timeline.