Bes is unlike the other gods of Egypt in almost every way, and that is the point. Where the great deities are shown in solemn profile, Bes is drawn full-face, staring out at the viewer, a bandy-legged bearded dwarf with a lion's mane and protruding tongue, a deliberately grotesque, apotropaic face meant to frighten off whatever threatens the vulnerable. He belonged not to the temples but to daily life: protector of the home, of pregnant women and of children, driver-away of snakes, scorpions and bad dreams. His image was carved on beds, headrests, mirrors, cosmetic pots and the birth-bricks on which women delivered, and amulets of him were worn by ordinary Egyptians for millennia. His popularity outlasted pharaonic religion, and Bes figures continued to be made into the Roman period, one of the most enduring of all Egyptian protective images.
Bes appears prominently in the mammisi, the small birth-houses attached to major Ptolemaic and Roman-period temples such as those at Dendera, Edfu and Philae, where the ritual re-enacted each year was the birth of the temple's divine child. Carved images of Bes appear at the top of the columns of these birth-houses, keeping company there with the hippopotamus-goddess Taweret and the Seven Hathors, the other protective deities of Egyptian childbirth, a placement that shows Bes was not a marginal household charm but a deity built into state temple architecture wherever the theology of divine birth required his particular kind of protection.