Huur, also spelt Xuur, is the death-messenger of pre-Islamic Somali tradition. Pictured as a huge bird comparable to a falcon or stork, he embodied the swift and unavoidable arrival of death: he announced deaths and escorted the souls of both the righteous and the wicked to the afterlife, functioning as a psychopomp within the cosmic order of the sky-god Waaq. Commentators have compared his avian form to the falcon-god Horus of ancient Egypt, a reflection of the wider Northeast-African milieu in which Cushitic religion developed.