A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work. Arrives with the Book of the Dead.
Setem sḏm
the god of hearing
Overview
Setem is hearing, personified — the fourth of the four gods of the senses, and, with Maa, one of the two the sources barely describe.
Budge: "Setem, the god of the sense of Hearing, is depicted in the ordinary form of a man-god, who has upon his head an ear, which is both the emblem of his chief attribute and the symbol of his name" [budge-1904].
One sentence. The grade records that.
Attestation history
The four gods of the senses. Budge treats them as a set [budge-1904]:
| God | Sense | Sign worn on the head |
|---|---|---|
| Sia | touch, and intelligence | the sign of his name |
| Hu | taste, and authoritative utterance | the sign of his name |
| Maa | sight | an eye |
| Setem | hearing | an ear |
Each is "depicted in the ordinary form of a man-god" wearing the sign that is "both the emblem of his chief attribute and the symbol of his name" [budge-1904]. There is no separate iconography to learn: the picture is the word.
What the texts say
Hearing is the sense Egyptian religion cared most about, and its god is the thinnest. That is a genuine oddity worth stating.
Sḏm is one of the commonest verbs in the language, and it carries obedience as well as perception — to hear is to heed. Egyptian prayers ask gods to hear; the standard plea is not "see me" but "hear my voice." Votive stelae are carved with ears, in their dozens, so that the god will hear the petitioner — the "hearing ear" chapels at Memphis and elsewhere are built on exactly that idea.
None of which is in the archived sources for this god. The ear-stelae practice is well documented in Egyptology and is not something the corpus can cite yet, so it sits in the open threads rather than in the entry. But it makes the gap conspicuous: the faculty with the largest devotional apparatus in Egypt has a deity attested in a single descriptive sentence.
The likeliest explanation is that petitioners addressed the ears of the great gods — Ptah in particular — rather than a personified Hearing. If so, that is the finding, and it would be worth stating positively.
Iconography
A man-god with an ear upon his head [budge-1904].
Cult and practice
None recorded for Setem himself.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, §IX "The Gods of the Senses" | Setem as the god of the sense of Hearing; man-god with an ear on his head |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, plate | the four gods of the senses shown together |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. II, ch. XIX §IX "The Gods of the Senses", pp. 296–299. Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md).[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open questions
- Find Setem in a primary text. As with Maa, Budge describes without
- Get the ear-stelae and "hearing ear" chapel material. It is the obvious context
- Establish whether sḏm here carries the sense of obedience as well as perception.
- Determine whether Setem is ever invoked, as opposed to merely depicted.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Setem", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.