Why the Egyptian gods have animal heads (and which animal is which)

It is always the first question. A child sees an Egyptian painting, stares at a man with the head of a black dog, and asks the obvious thing: why?

And the usual answer — "because they worshipped animals" — is both incomplete and slightly wrong. The Egyptians did not worship cats. They worshipped what a cat is good at, and used its head as a label that told you at a glance what that god was for.

Once a child grasps that, Egyptian mythology stops being a gallery of monsters and becomes something much closer to a system of icons. Let's walk through it.

The idea, in one sentence

The head doesn't tell you what the god is. It tells you what the god does.

A jackal prowls around graveyards: the god of the dead has a jackal's head. A falcon flies higher than anything and sees everything: the king-god has a falcon's head. An ibis walks through mud drawing squiggles with its beak: the god of writing has an ibis's head.

It isn't superstition. It is graphic design, three thousand years before the phrase existed.

Anubis, the jackal who weighs you

Anubis and the Scales of Truth is the one that most impresses children — and it isn't frightening, however it looks.

Anubis weighed the heart of every dead person on a scale, against a feather. If the heart weighed the same or less than the feather, you went on. If it weighed more — because of everything you had done wrong — you did not.

The image of a heart that weighs what you did is one that sticks. And it opens an excellent conversation: what do you think makes a heart heavy?

Bastet, the cat who guards the house

Bastet the Cat Goddess explains something children love: why cats mattered so much in Egypt.

Cats killed the snakes and mice that got into houses and grain stores. They protected the food and they protected sleeping children. Bastet is exactly that turned into a goddess: domestic protection, in the shape of a cat.

If there is a cat in the house, this story tells itself.

Horus, the falcon who sees everything

Horus and the Battle for Egypt is the story of a son who wins back what was taken from his father. It is long, it has a real villain, and it works well from about seven.

His eye — the famous Eye of Horus you see on amulets and t-shirts — comes from this story. It is worth pointing out: children recognise the symbol long before they know the tale.

Thoth, the ibis who invented writing

Thoth and the Gift of Writing tells how letters came into the world. For a child who is learning to write, it is a myth with a particular resonance: there was a time when this did not exist and somebody had to invent it.

Ra and the boat that crosses the night

Ra and the Sun Boat answers the question every small child asks: where does the sun go when it sets?

In the Egyptian answer, Ra climbs into a boat each morning, crosses the sky from east to west, and at night descends into the world below, where he has to get through twelve hours of danger before he can rise again. Dawn is not guaranteed: it has to be earned every night.

It is a beautiful and slightly unsettling idea, and five- and six-year-olds are gripped by it.

Isis and Osiris: the story holding up all the others

Isis and Osiris is Egypt's central myth, the one that explains where the others come from. There is betrayal between brothers, a search across the whole country, and a love that refuses to give up.

It is denser than the rest. I would save it until Anubis, Horus and Bastet are familiar — that way the names already mean something when they turn up.

And the ones that aren't about gods

Egypt isn't all gods. There are tales that were told for pleasure, and they are among the best:

• The Shipwrecked Sailor: a wreck, an island and a giant serpent who turns out to be kind. Probably the oldest adventure story that survives in writing.
• The Girl with the Rose-Red Slippers: an Egyptian Cinderella, with a falcon instead of a fairy godmother. Written more than a thousand years before the version we know.
• The Prince and the Sphinx: a prince falls asleep in the Sphinx's shadow and she speaks to him in a dream.

Where to start, by age

• 3 to 5: Bastet and Ra. A cat who protects and a sun that travels by boat.
• 6 to 8: Anubis, Thoth and the Shipwrecked Sailor.
• 9 to 11: Horus, Isis and Osiris, and the conversation about why the Egyptians cared so much about what happened after death.

Listen to them

All twelve Egyptian tales are narrated with illustrations in the Egyptian mythology collection. And The Creation of the World makes a good closer: the Egyptian version of how everything started, which looks nothing like the Norse or the Greek one.

Read next: Romulus and Remus, the twins and the she-wolf · The Norse myths your child already half-knows

Start here: Anubis and the Scales of Truth.