The Nile crocodile was dangerous enough, and common enough along the river, that Egyptian religion made a virtue of confronting rather than merely fearing it: Sobek, depicted as a crocodile or a crocodile-headed man, was worshipped as a god of the Nile's fertility and military strength, honored at temple centers including Kom Ombo and the Faiyum region, where live sacred crocodiles were reportedly kept, adorned and fed by priests, according to Greek visitors such as Herodotus and Strabo who recorded the practice with some fascination.
Sobek's cult treated the crocodile's power ambivalently rather than as purely benevolent: the same strength that made the animal a fitting symbol of pharaonic might and Nile fertility also made it a real threat to be placated, and Sobek is invoked in some funerary texts both as protector and as a danger the deceased must safely pass.
Kom Ombo is unusual among Egyptian temples in being a double sanctuary, its southern half given to Sobek and its northern half to Haroeris, Horus the Elder, with the plan mirrored on either side of a shared axis so that neither god is made subordinate to the other. In the Faiyum, the town the Egyptians called Shedet was known to Greek writers as Crocodilopolis, and the resident sacred crocodile they named Petsuchos, the son of Sobek, was replaced by a successor on its death rather than leaving the office vacant. Mummified crocodiles have been recovered in very large numbers from Egyptian animal cemeteries, hatchlings and unhatched eggs among them, which says something about the scale at which the cult operated as well as about its beliefs.