Anubis

In the Pyramid Texts of Unas at Saqqara, carved around 2350 BCE into the oldest religious literature in the world, Utterance 213 addresses the dead king: “Your face is that of Anubis.” The face that meets the underworld is the face of the jackal. At this point in Egyptian history, Anubis is not a guide or an attendant or an embalmer. He is the Lord of the Dead. He holds the title “Foremost of the Westerners,” meaning ruler of all who have crossed to the other side. No god outranks him in the realm of death.

That would change. But the change itself is one of the most revealing episodes in Egyptian theological history.

The Animal

The creature Egyptians depicted as Anubis is black. Real jackals are sandy gold. The black carries three layers of meaning: the color of the resins and natron used in mummification, the color of the fertile Nile silt that meant renewal, and the color of the underworld through which the dead travel. Black is not death in Egyptian symbolism. It is the soil from which life returns.

A 2011 genetic study published in PLOS ONE by Rueness and colleagues demonstrated that the Egyptian animal long classified as a golden jackal is not a jackal at all. Canis lupaster, the African wolf, is genetically distinct from the true golden jackal (Canis aureus) by 6.7%, a greater divergence than between gray wolves and coyotes. The Greeks may have known. They called one of Anubis’s cult centers at Asyut Lykopolis: the City of the Wolf.

Salima Ikram, the Egyptologist who led the Catacombs of Anubis Project at Saqqara, describes the Anubis animal as a “super-canid” combining attributes of multiple canine types. Wild canids prowled the edges of desert cemeteries, scavenging at burial grounds. The Egyptians took the cemetery prowler and made it the cemetery guardian. The threat became the protector.

The Demotion

In the Old Kingdom, Anubis ruled the dead. By the Middle Kingdom, he worked for the ruler of the dead.

The Osiris cult expanded dramatically during the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom (roughly 2181-1650 BCE). Osiris, the god who died, was resurrected, and became king of the afterlife, offered a narrative that Anubis could not match: a story of death and return, of justice beyond the grave, of a king who understood what it meant to be murdered and buried because he had experienced it himself. The democratization of the afterlife, making resurrection available to commoners through the Coffin Texts rather than restricting it to kings, favored a god with a story over a god with a function.

The priesthoods handled the transition with the tool theologians have always used: genealogy. Rather than eliminate Anubis, they made him Osiris’s son. The new mythology: Osiris had a secret affair with Nephthys (Set’s wife). Nephthys abandoned the resulting child. Isis found the infant Anubis and raised him as her own. Some traditions hold that Set’s discovery of this affair motivated his murder of Osiris.

In a single genealogical revision, Anubis went from independent lord to loyal son. His title “Foremost of the Westerners” was transferred to Osiris. His functions were preserved, embalmer, guide, scale-operator, but his authority was subordinated. The god who created mummification by embalming the first body (Osiris’s) was recast as Osiris’s servant performing a service for his father.

The Scales

The Weighing of the Heart is the most reproduced scene in Egyptian art, and Anubis is at its center.

Book of the Dead Spell 125 describes the procedure. Anubis leads the deceased into the Hall of Two Truths before Osiris and 42 assessor gods. The dead person makes a Negative Confession: “I have not stolen. I have not killed. I have not told lies.” Forty-two denials for forty-two judges.

Then the heart goes on the scale. Anubis places it on one pan and the feather of Ma’at, the principle of cosmic order, on the other. He steadies the plumb bob. He checks the balance. Thoth, ibis-headed, stands beside the scale with a scribe’s palette, recording the result. A small baboon, another form of Thoth, squats atop the balance’s upright support.

If the heart balances with the feather, the deceased has lived justly. Horus takes them by the hand and presents them to Osiris. Eternity begins.

If the heart is heavier, Ammit eats it. Ammit has the head of a crocodile, the forequarters of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, the three largest man-eating animals the Egyptians knew. The person whose heart she devours does not go to a place of punishment. They cease to exist. No afterlife. No memory. Total annihilation. This is worse than any hell because in a hell you at least continue.

The Papyrus of Ani (c. 1250 BCE, British Museum EA 10470), 37 frames of cursive hieroglyphs and painted vignettes, contains the most famous illustration of this scene. Anubis kneels by the scale, described as “he who is in the place of embalming,” a title that followed him from the mummification chamber to the judgment hall.

The Mask

Priests wore Anubis’s face while embalming the dead.

A surviving jackal-headed mask from the 19th Dynasty (c. 1292-1189 BCE) is held at the Louvre (N 4096). Wooden, with erect ears symbolizing the watchful attitude of the cemetery guardian. The priest who wore it became Anubis for the duration of the ritual. The sem-priest, the chief officiant, performed the Opening of the Mouth ceremony using specialized tools, the adze and peseshkef, to touch the mummy’s eyes and mouth, symbolically restoring the senses the dead would need in the afterlife.

The 70-day mummification process removed the organs through a left-side abdominal incision. The heart stayed. Everything else went into canopic jars guarded by the Four Sons of Horus. The jackal-headed son, Duamutef, protected the stomach. He is not Anubis, but the visual echo is deliberate: a jackal watching over the dismantled body, just as a jackal watches over the dismantled cemetery.

Eight Million Dogs

At the Anubieion in North Saqqara, the temple complex east of the Step Pyramid, catacombs held an estimated eight million mummified dogs. Ikram’s team documented the scale. The animals include dogs, jackals, foxes, falcons, cats, and mongooses. Many dogs were only hours or days old when mummified, bred specifically as votive offerings.

The system worked like this: worshippers came to the temple seeking Anubis’s favor, typically protection for a deceased relative navigating the afterlife. They purchased a mummified canid from the temple economy. The mummy was offered to Anubis and interred in the catacombs. The temple generated income. The dogs generated spiritual currency. Eight million transactions between the living and the dead, mediated by a god whose face was the face of the animal that haunted the cemeteries.

The Tutankhamun Shrine

Howard Carter found it in 1922, guarding the entrance to the Treasury of KV62. A recumbent black jackal mounted on a gilded pylon-shaped shrine, ears erect, eyes of calcite and obsidian, claws of silver. The body was coated in black resin. When Carter discovered it, a linen cloth dated to the seventh year of Akhenaten’s reign wrapped the figure, and a garland of lotus and lily flowers hung around its neck.

The shrine faced west, toward the afterlife. Inside the casket: alternating djed pillars (Osiris) and tyet knots (Isis), amulets, alabaster vases, and eight breast plates. The Anubis figure protected the canopic chest and the most sacred burial equipment. He was the last guardian between the tomb robber and the king’s preserved organs.

The statue is catalogued as Carter find number 261, Egyptian Museum Cairo JE 61444. It will likely move to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza.

Beyond Egypt

When Greek culture merged with Egyptian during the Ptolemaic period, Anubis merged with Hermes. Both were psychopomps, guides of the dead. The resulting figure, Hermanubis, had a human body, a jackal head, and carried the caduceus of Hermes. Plutarch mentions the name in De Iside et Osiride. Porphyry calls Hermanubis synthetos, “composite,” and mixellin, “half-Greek.” The god of Egyptian embalming carried a Greek messenger’s staff.

The structural parallel extends further than the Mediterranean. Xolotl, the Aztec dog-headed god, guided souls to Mictlan, the underworld. The Xoloitzcuintli, the Mexican hairless dog, was sacrificed and buried with its owner to serve as a guide in death. No historical contact with Egypt existed. The pattern is independent: a canid associated with death and guidance appears on both sides of the Atlantic because dogs and death are associated everywhere humans bury their dead and watch animals dig at the edges of the graves.

What Survives

The Papyrus of Ani is in the British Museum. The Anubis shrine is in Cairo. The Louvre holds the priest’s mask. Eight million dog mummies lie in the catacombs at Saqqara.

In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Anubis appears as Mr. Jacquel, a funeral home director in Cairo, Illinois, who weighs the hearts of the recently dead on a brass scale. The jackal still works the same job. The address changed.

The animal on the shrine is not a jackal. It is a wolf that looks like a jackal, painted black to mean not death but the dark soil from which green things grow. The god who wore that face was once the ruler of every soul that crossed the western horizon. He was demoted, rewritten, made someone’s son. He kept working. He weighed the hearts. He guided the dead. He guarded the gate. Three thousand years of continuous employment, through every theological revision the priesthoods imposed, and the job description never changed: make sure the dead get where they are going.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Pyramid Texts of Unas, Saqqara (c. 2350 BCE): Utterances 213, 224 — earliest corpus of religious literature, Anubis as supreme funerary deity
• Book of the Dead, Spell 125 (Weighing of the Heart): Anubis operates the scales, Thoth records, Ammit waits
• Papyrus of Ani (c. 1250 BCE, British Museum EA 10470): most famous illustration of the Weighing scene
• Tutankhamun’s Anubis Shrine (c. 1323 BCE, Egyptian Museum Cairo JE 61444, Carter find 261)
• P. Nicholson, The Catacombs of Anubis at North Saqqara: ~8 million mummified dogs
• Rueness et al., ‘The Cryptic African Wolf,’ PLOS ONE (2011): the ‘jackal’ is a wolf