#apedemak

Apedemak

A lionheaded deity with cult centers at Musawwarat el-Sufra and Naqa in Sudan.

So um I may have 'made' something. u/Eternalspace1969 made images of many egyptian deities and posted them on Reddit for free use. Considering there were none of Apedemak and Aman I decided to try my hand at editing some of his images to make their representations. So here they are!

Lord Apedemak

Lord Aman

and Lady Amesemi

Sang Nila Utama's Discovery

Sang Nila Utama, a medieval Malay prince of Palembang, has ventured deep into the jungles of a small Southeast Asian island and uncovered a temple to the lion god Apedemak meant to accommodate Kushite merchants from Africa in ancient times. It is this experience that will lead him to christen the island, and the kingdom he will found upon it, Singapura (“Lion City”), eventually to be Anglicized as Singapore.

This illustration is inspired by the history of Singapore, where I was born and spent six years of my childhood as an American expat. The legend goes that Sang Nila Utama reported seeing a lion on the island, but the problem is that lions, as creatures of the open savanna rather than the dense rainforest, would have never ranged into Singapore in historic times. The thought occurred to me that what he might have seen was not a flesh-and-blood animal but rather the man-made image of a lion, and my mind thereafter drifted to the lion-headed deities of the African Nile Valley such as Sekhmet and Apedemak.