The modern Egyptians also believe that when any serpent reaches extreme old age it grows long hair. There is the ancient story of the Middle Kingdom of the Shipwrecked Sailor who was saved by a bearded serpent. (Blackman, 1932, p 41-48) Local belief says that an aged cobra with long blond hair lives in the Osirion, at the back of the Temple of Seti I. There certainly is a large cobra living there, but it has not hair, blond or brunette. A similar story is told of a cobra living in the so-called Campbell's Tomb, near the Great Sphinx of Giza. Probably someone saw these creatures when they were shedding their skins and mistook some loose shreds of the transparent outer skin for blond hair.
Many modern Egyptians believe that if a cobra decides to come and live in a house, and it is not molested by the human tenants, it will attack and bite thieves. This may well be true, for if a thief entered a house and encountered a cobra, his first reaction would be to attack, in which case, the reptile would retaliate in self-defense.
I once shared a house with a cobra and found it to be not only harmless, but even friendly, in a dignified way. It would drink fresh milk, but turned up its nose at the dry powdered variety, and would suck raw eggs. Unseemly bulges in its anatomy indicated a fondness for sparrows and the neighbor's baby chicks. Its capacity as a guardian was never put to the test.
In a field not far from the Temple of Sety I at Abydos is a pumping machine, which until very recently was used to irrigate some land. The mechanic in charge kept two cobras in a small hut beside the machine and fed them regularly on raw eggs. He regarded them as guardians of the machine and certainly he was never bothered by thieves who, unable to steal a heavy piece of machinery, made practice of stealing some small, but essential part of it, which they then hold for ransom. The presence of his cobras being well-known locally prevented even the mechanic's friends from visiting him after dark!
There is a story, frequently told and firmly believed in, that a cobra once lived in a house where the residents always treated her kindly. She had produced a young one, but one day the latter disappeared. His mother, thinking that someone in the house had killed him, went at once to the water storage jar and spit poison into it in order to avenge her son by killing off the whole human family.
However, before anyone had the occasion to take water from the jar, the young snake appeared. After assuring herself that he was quite unharmed, the female cobra went back to the jar and struck it hard blows with her head, until it broke and the water was spilled harmlessly on the ground. The story, which is told all over Egypt, invariably happened in the house of a "friend of a friend" of the teller! (Variations of this legend can be found in Gayer-Anderson, 1951, 59-61 and Keimer, 1947, 90.)
If there is a grain of truth in the story, the cobra was probably only drinking from the jar, and in any case, snake venom is harmless taken internally, unless there is any small wound in the drinker's mouth, and even then, the small quantity ejected would be completely ineffective in a jar full of water.
The idea of a cobra as a guardian was well known to the ancient Egyptians, this being the function of the uraeus worn on the pharaoh's brow. In the Pyramid Texts it says: "His gods are over him; his uraeus is upon his brow. The leader-serpent of Unas is upon his forehead, she who perceives the soul, a diadem of flame." (Sethe 1910, 396 b-c)
Elsewhere, the cobra is again regarded as a guardian: "You are loosed, O wfi-serpent, cause Unas to be protected." (Sethe 1910, 442a-b)