Ancient Egyptian god of magic is sometimes a bird, sometimes a baboon. Now we know why.
An African sacred Ibis perched on a rock in South Africa (right). Why do ancient deities appear as certain animals? In the case of an ancient Egyptian god named Thoth, the relation to its animal might be related to moonlight.
- ▪An African sacred Ibis perched on a rock in South Africa (right).
- ▪Why do ancient deities appear as certain animals?
- ▪In the case of an ancient Egyptian god named Thoth, the relation to its animal might be related to moonlight.
Popular Science files mainly under science. We currently carry 121 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Popular Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.popsci.com/environment/ancient-egypt-thoth-baboon-bird-moon/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:10:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T20:18:59.062Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T20:18:59.062Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ekmhY90q8AIW · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A Hamadryas baboon in Eritrea (left). An African sacred Ibis perched on a rock in South Africa (right). Image: Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images/ EcoPic via Getty Images Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Email address Sign up Thank you! By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. Why do ancient deities appear as certain animals? In the case of an ancient Egyptian god named Thoth, the relation to its animal might be related to moonlight.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Popular Science.
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