ANTHROPOMORPHIC DEITIES
This cyclical-mythological system seems to work well without the involvement of anthropomorphic gods (Kaul 1998: 242ff.). The sun was not (or only rarely) underworld could also be hidden.
Furthermore, the Sun god might take other forms which were not human. Another razor depicts a ship with horse-headed stems carrying a curious winding mixture of shapes, which are very difficult to interpret (Thrane 1987: 21-3; Kaul 1998: cat. no. 105; 2005). One interpretation is that the Sun god reveals himself in different forms or manifestations, with both human and zoomorphic elements, so that we can separate three interconnected figures. On the left is a figure with human legs and an S-shaped horse-like body ending in what seems to be a curled neck with a stylized aquatic bird head, but it is very difficult to judge whether this is genuinely what is depicted. The next figure seems to have a raised stylized horse-shaped head, with a curled-in snout, and finally the third figure looks like a dancing or jumping person, but with a stylized animal head. These three figures can be regarded as three renderings of exactly the same motif, namely the Sun god at different times of the day showing both anthropomorphic and zoomorphic elements. All the S-shaped symbols surrounding the ship could be renderings of the same phenomenon: stylized sun-horses (see Sprockhoff 1954: 46-51).
The motifs on another razor can be interpreted along the same lines (Kaul 2005), perceiving the figures as renderings of different appearances of the same Sun god, perhaps representing different times of the day. Let us then try to “read” this razor (as a text) from left to right, the direction of the sun during daytime. First, over the stem aft of the ship we see a snake, perhaps a morning snake, having the same role as the fish as seen on some other razors, but it could also be a symbol or manifestation of the sun itself.
The next figure is an enigmatic, fantastic animal, yet its different elements suggest a stylized horse with a curled muzzle; the extra spiral could be an ear or the mane. The S-shape of the figure and its decoration is quite different from the renderings of sun-horses on other razors. Here, the hind leg of the horse is not the leg of an animal, but a human leg. Just beneath this figure is an S-shaped figure, a stylized or symbolic rendering of the sun-horse. Thus the Bronze Age artist has simultaneously skilfully concealed and revealed a sun-horse and thus a symbol or manifestation of the sun. Then at the far right we find the Sun god in human form with the head of the horse or perhaps even a bird of prey - a falcon? This way of depicting the sun, partly human, partly animal, should not be totally alien to us, when we remember the different shapes that the Egyptian gods - particularly the sun or the Sun god (Re) - could take (Quirke 2001; Hornung 2005). The three figures dominating the ship depicted on the razor could be seen as three figures representing exactly the same phenomenon, namely the sun at three different stages of the day, in three different shapes, with an increasing predominance of the human shape and with an increasing shift from zoomorphization to anthropomorphization.