The cow is one of the oldest sustained animal symbols in the historical record, read across widely separated traditions as a figure of nourishment, fertility and the sky itself. In Egypt the cow is bound most closely to Hathor, whose horned crown cradling a sun disk is a direct borrowing of bovine imagery, and to Nut, sometimes depicted as a great cow whose body arches over the earth as the sky, standing on legs planted at the four cardinal points. The cow's milk, offered freely and continuously, made it a natural figure for a nurturing sky goddess whose body itself was understood to sustain the world beneath it.
In Vedic and later Hindu tradition, the cow holds a related but distinct status, most famously as kamadhenu, the wish-fulfilling cow whose milk, in some tellings, could grant anything asked of it, and as an animal whose protection became bound up with dharmic conduct generally. The specific content of the reverence differs sharply between these traditions, Egyptian solar and Hindu dharmic, but the underlying logic, an animal whose gift of milk without visible cost reads as an image of divine, unearned sustenance, recurs independently in both.