The religion of Ancient Egypt is a balance between man and nature. Egyptians worshipped nature as a god. Prayers were made for the plants, the wind, and the air. Nature and man could not be separated. Many of the Egyptian gods were represented as animals. The Ivis bird became the god of wisdom, Horus, the bird god, presided over Upper Egypt, and the cow goddess Hathor was the mother of the pharaohs and temples were built in her honor. Other animals also had roles in society. The hippo represented childbirth, the giraffe represented foresight, the lion was considered to be the king, and the male hippo represented danger. The buffalo was a very powerful animal, and so it represented power. The pharaoh Narmer (Menes) was depicted as a buffalo to show that he was powerful. The most important animal in Ancient Egypt was the cow. The language shows a deep love and respect for the cow. Considered to be divine the cow was treated as an equal and could only be killed for food in a case of extreme starvation, and even then you had to ask the gods permission before killing the cow. The number of cows you owned were a reflection of you're status. The society of the Nure that still exists today looks at the cow in this way and it likely that the Ancient Egyptians thought this way as well. Another way that Egypt looked at nature symbolically was in their art. Art was a way of capturing a moment in nature. An Ancient Egyptian knife handle had carvings of over 40 different species of animals carved onto it. The art of Ancient Egypt depicted animals such as the hippo, the purple galanger, and the pied king fisher so that those creatures could be brought into the afterlife with the dead. The art tells us a lot about this society because we can see moments in time and the way that people lived. The fact that the art exists tells us that Egyptians were intelligent, and it is one of the things that makes Egypt a civilization.