Anubis

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A black canine crouches on a gilded chest, ears pricked, forepaws stretched along the wood, eyes of calcite and obsidian fixed on something past the edge of the world. The figure rode out of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 on top of a portable shrine, wrapped in a linen shirt, a scarf of fine cloth knotted at its throat. Carved of wood and coated in resinous black, the animal is not a portrait of any living jackal. The color is the color of the embalmed flesh after the natron and the bitumen have done their work, the color of the fertile silt that renews the fields — death and regeneration pressed into one pigment. The beast that lies upon the box is the god who keeps the box, and what the box holds is the dead.

That god is Anubis: in the Egyptian tongue Anpu or Inpu, the jackal-headed lord of embalming, of the desert cemetery, and of the long passage the dead must walk before they can be reckoned righteous. He is among the oldest gods named in Egypt and among the most immediately legible to anyone who has never read a hieroglyph — the man with the dog’s head, standing over a body on a lion-footed couch, or steadying the beam of a scale. For all that familiarity, his position in the divine order shifted profoundly across three thousand years, and the shift is the key to everything else about him.

Genealogy: the lord of the west and his demotion

The animal came first. Along the desert margins where the Egyptians buried their dead — the high, dry ground west of the cultivation, beyond the reach of the inundation — jackals and wild dogs prowled the cemeteries by night, digging at shallow graves. The choice of a scavenger as the guardian of graves has the logic of inoculation: the creature that threatened the dead was raised to the office of protecting them. By the early dynasties the jackal had become a god of the necropolis, and his epithets fix his domain precisely. He is Khenty-imentiu, “Foremost of the Westerners” — the west being the land of the dead, the direction of the setting sun and of the burial grounds on the Nile’s far bank. He is neb-ta-djeser, “Lord of the Sacred Land,” the desert necropolis itself. He is tepy-dju-ef, “He who is upon his mountain,” the jackal keeping watch over the tombs from the heights above. And he is imy-ut, “He who is in the place of embalming,” the god of the chamber where bodies were made imperishable.

In the Pyramid Texts — the funerary spells carved into royal burial chambers from the late Old Kingdom, the oldest large body of religious writing the Egyptians left — Anubis is the principal god of the dead. The king’s face is identified with him; offerings are promised through “Anpu-khent-Amenta,” Anubis foremost of the West. At this stratum he is not anyone’s servant. He presides over the funeral and the tomb in his own right. This is the genealogical fact that everything later in his story works to absorb and reorganize: before the great mortuary god of Egypt was Osiris, it was Anubis.

The change came with the rise of the Osiris myth across the Middle Kingdom. As the murdered-and-restored king-god rose to dominate the Egyptian conception of death and resurrection, the older lord of the necropolis was folded into the new mythology — not erased but subordinated, given a place inside the family of Osiris. The textual record of that subordination is uneven and instructive. Some Egyptian sources call Anpu the son of Ra; the genealogist behind the hosted nineteenth-century compendium of funerary belief notes flatly that “in Egyptian texts Anpu is called the son of Ra.” But the version that prevailed, and that the Greeks inherited, made him the son of Osiris and Nephthys.

Wall painting from the tomb of Sennedjem, Deir el-Medina, 19th Dynasty (ca. 1292–1189 BCE). — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Plutarch, the Greek priest and essayist of the late first and early second centuries CE, preserved the fullest narrative of that parentage in his treatise on Isis and Osiris, and a digest of it survives in the introduction to the hosted Book of the Dead. In the wandering of Isis after her husband’s death, she discovers that Osiris had lain with her sister Nephthys, and that Anubis was the child of that union — exposed at birth by his mother, then sought out by Isis, who tracks the infant with the help of dogs and rears him as her guard and attendant. The lord of the dead becomes the loyal son of the lord of the dead’s myth. From principal to progeny: the demotion is plain, and the older grandeur never quite disappears beneath it.

The teaching: embalmer, guardian, weigher

What Anubis does, in the developed mythology, is mummify Osiris. When the murdered god’s body is recovered, it is Anubis who wraps and anoints and reassembles it, and in doing so he establishes the rite. Mummification is, in the Egyptian frame, a divine technology with a divine precedent: every embalming repeats the first embalming, the one the jackal god performed on the body of the murdered king. The workshop where the work is done is the wabet, the “pure place,” and Anubis is its presiding power. The embalmer at his station does not merely imitate the god; in the ritual logic he becomes him. Reliefs and papyri show a priest in a jackal mask leaning over the mummy on its couch, and the mask is not costume but office — for the duration of the rite the man is the god, his hands the god’s hands.

The point of the work is not preservation for its own sake but the survival of the person. The Egyptian self was a composite of parts — the body, the ka or vital double, the ba or mobile soul, the name, the shadow — and the body had to endure as the anchor to which the other parts could return. Anubis is the god who makes the anchor hold. A spell in the Book of the Dead addresses him directly in this role: “Chapter of the hands of Anpu, the dweller in the sepulchral chamber, being upon the lord of life” — the “lord of life” being the mummy itself, the wrapped body that is, paradoxically, the seat of the life to come. The companion rite of the opening of the mouth, which restored the senses to the embalmed body so that it could eat, breathe, and speak in the next world, belongs to the same complex of mortuary acts over which the jackal god kept watch.

The geography of his office is exact. The cemeteries lay west of the river and beyond the cultivation, on the desert margin past the reach of the annual flood — placed there, the hosted compendium of Egyptian belief observes, “in places where the mummies were least likely to decay or be disturbed.” Because death usually fell on the inhabited east bank while the tombs waited on the west, the body had to be ferried across the Nile, and that crossing was itself a charged passage, a rehearsal in miniature of the larger journey to come. Anubis governs the whole of this threshold landscape — the river crossing, the embalming tent, the necropolis on its mountain — which is why his epithets read almost as a map of the dead’s itinerary rather than a list of honors. He is foremost in the West because the West is where the dead go; he is upon his mountain because the tombs climb the desert cliffs; he is in the place of embalming because the body is remade before it is buried. The titles are not poetry layered over the god. They are the stations of his work.

Papyrus of Hunefer, 19th Dynasty (ca. 1275 BCE), British Museum EA 9901. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From the workshop the god moves into the hall of judgment. Embalmed and equipped, the dead must pass through the Duat, the netherworld, and stand before the tribunal of Osiris, and the central act of that tribunal is the weighing of the heart. There the heart of the deceased is set against the feather of Maat, and a heart heavy with wrongdoing is devoured — the full scene the province of that rite; here what matters is the jackal’s part in it.

Anubis is the one who works the balance. The funerary papyri show him crouched at the upright of the scale, his hand on the plummet, testing the tongue of the beam to be sure the weighing is exact. The hosted Book of the Dead preserves the inscription set above his head in one such scene, the god’s own charge to himself rendered in the careful first person of ritual address: “pray thee, O weigher of righteousness, to guide the balance that it may be stablished.” Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe, records the result; Osiris pronounces the verdict from his throne; but it is the jackal who guarantees the measurement, the impartiality of the instrument on which a soul’s eternity turns. To this office belongs the further title “He who counts the hearts.” The god who once threatened graves now stands surety for the justice of the dead.

The arrangement of the hall makes the division of labor plain. In the great judgment vignette of the scribe Ani, twelve gods sit enthroned above the scene — among them Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Hathor “lady of Amenta,” and the rest of the great company — while the action below belongs to the specialists. Maat, or her feather, occupies one pan; the heart sits in the other; Anubis steadies the beam; a dog-headed ape, sacred to Thoth, perches on the balance to watch the plummet. Beside the scale crouches Am-mit, the “Devourer of the Dead,” part lion, part hippopotamus, part crocodile, ready for any heart that fails. The dead one’s own destiny and the goddess of his birth-hour stand near, witnesses to a reckoning that gathers the whole arc of a life into a single act of measurement. The Egyptians did not picture judgment as a verdict handed down so much as a weighing performed — a physical operation with an honest instrument — and the integrity of that instrument is the jackal’s particular charge. He does not decide; he ensures that the decision is true.

He is, in sum, the conductor — the power who receives the body, makes it imperishable, escorts it through the hidden land, and tends the scale that decides its fate. The Greeks had a word for such a figure, psychopompos, the guide of souls, and Anubis is the Egyptian instance of the type. It is worth marking what the entry will not do here: the embalming arts are doctrine and architecture, the meaning of a rite, not a manual. The Egyptians guarded the operative details closely; the surviving sources describe the god’s role and the belief that animated it far more than the technique, and that is the level at which the jackal god is best understood — as the divine warrant for the survival of the dead, not as a recipe.

A question about the animal

A footnote of natural history complicates the iconic image. The creature long called the “Egyptian jackal,” Canis aureus lupaster, was reclassified in the early twenty-first century after phylogenetic study placed it within the gray wolf complex; it is now generally treated as the African wolf, a distinct lineage from the golden jackal. Whether the animal that prowled the New Kingdom cemeteries and lent the god his head was strictly a jackal, a wild dog, or this wolf-adjacent canid is a question the ancient sources cannot settle, since the Egyptian artists worked from a recognizable silhouette rather than a taxonomy. The hosted compendium of Egyptian belief hedges the point in just this way, describing the god as headed by “a dog or a jackal.” What the Egyptians fixed was the form, not the species: the long muzzle, the upright ears, the lean recumbent body, the black of death and rebirth. The figure on Tutankhamun’s shrine answers to all of this and to no living animal exactly.

Anubis was not alone in the desert. A closely related jackal god, Wepwawet — “Opener of the Ways” — shared his form and much of his function, the two so near that the sources frequently confuse them; on funerary monuments a pair of jackals often appears, one for each god, watching over the northern and southern reaches of the funerary world. The cult of Anubis centered on the seventeenth nome of Upper Egypt, at the city the Greeks called Cynopolis, “dog city,” and the vast canine catacombs at Saqqara — where votive mummies of dogs and jackals were interred by the thousands — testify to how widely and how literally his animal was honored.

Reception and afterlife: the jackal in a toga

When Greeks and then Romans came to rule Egypt, Anubis did not fade; he traveled. His function as guide of the dead mapped almost exactly onto that of the Greek Hermes, the messenger who also conducted souls down to Hades, and out of that overlap grew a composite deity, Hermanubis. The earliest securely dated inscription naming him comes from the island of Delos in the second century BCE, in the Hellenistic Aegean rather than in Egypt itself. Under the Ptolemies and then under Rome the figure flourished, especially in cosmopolitan Alexandria, where the cult clustered around the great sanctuary of Serapis, the other great Greco-Egyptian synthesis of the age. In Roman-period images Hermanubis keeps the jackal head atop an athletic human body draped in Greek or Roman dress, and carries the caduceus of Hermes-Mercury — a marble statue of exactly this type, found at Anzio in the eighteenth century and now in the Vatican’s Egyptian collection, shows the god as a youthful figure in a himation, jackal-faced, the herald’s staff in hand. The dog of the necropolis had become a cosmopolitan god of the crossing between worlds, legible to a Greek and an Egyptian at once.

There is a quieter afterlife in the documentary record of the religion itself. The same scenes that the hosted Book of the Dead and a nineteenth-century survey of Egyptian magic describe in such detail — the jackal-headed god laying out the mummy on its couch, steadying the scales beside the hawk-headed Horus, “quietly adjusted by the dog-headed Anubis,” in the phrasing of the nineteenth-century digest — became, through the rediscovery and translation of Egyptian funerary texts in the modern era, the most reproduced of all Egyptian religious imagery. The judgment papyrus of the scribe Hunefer, with Anubis at the balance, is among the most familiar single objects to survive from the ancient world.

Across that long arc the god kept a consistent shape even as his rank and his company changed. He was the lord of the dead, then the son of the lord of the dead; the principal of the necropolis, then the loyal attendant; the Egyptian jackal, then the Greco-Roman herald with a jackal’s face. What held through every revision was the office: the one who receives the body when the breath has gone, makes it ready, walks beside it through the dark, and sees that the scale on which it is judged tells the truth.

→ In the library: Budge, The Book of the Dead · Samuel Sharpe, Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity (1863)

→ Related: Osiris · Isis · Horus · Thoth · Seth · Ancient Egypt · Book Of The Dead · Serapis · Pyramid Texts · Coffin Texts · Duat · Ra · Maat · Weighing Of The Heart · Ka Egyptian Soul · Ba Egyptian Soul · Opening Of The Mouth · Hathor · Atum · Ptah · Heka Egyptian Magic