Anubis

Is Anubis a jackal or a dog?

The Egyptian evidence points to a jackal, but writers have seen a dog since antiquity, and modern genetics has renamed the animal. Budge calls the jackal “the type and symbol of the god”, and Erman explains why: in the desert where the dead were buried, jackals could be seen every evening prowling in the dusk. Greek and Roman writers saw a dog. Plutarch has dogs lead Isis to the infant, and in the procession of Isis that Apuleius describes, which Budge quotes, the god rears “his dog’s head and neck”, his face “black as night, and golden as the day”. Budge judged that Diodorus, “like many modern writers”, had confused the dog with the jackal, though he allowed that the dog too may have been sacred to Anubis, and concluded that the Egyptians did not carefully tell wolf, jackal and dog apart. The Global Egyptian Museum keeps both words, “a jackal or dog”, and the British Museum’s 1909 guide calls him “the Dog-god, or Jackal-god”.

The animal itself has since changed name. In 2015 a DNA study led by Klaus-Peter Koepfli and Robert Wayne, reported by UCLA, found that the African “golden jackal” is a separate species, which they named the African golden wolf; it lives across North and East Africa and is nearer to grey wolves and coyotes than to jackals. The Houston Museum of Natural Science notes that the Egyptian jackal, “long thought to be the inspiration for the god Anubis”, may therefore be an African wolf, though its classification remains unresolved.

Why is Anubis black?

For death and for the earth: black in Egyptian painting stood both for the fruitful earth and for death, the Global Egyptian Museum says. The Houston Museum of Natural Science reads Anubis’s black as rebirth, to match the belief that the dead are reborn in the afterlife.

Anubis at the weighing of the heart

In the Papyrus of Ani, as Budge describes it, Anubis kneels by the balance, jackal-headed, holding the weight of its tongue in his right hand; behind him the ibis-headed Thoth stands ready with a reed to write down the result, and the beast Ammit, the “Eater of the Dead”, waits to devour the heart if it is found light. All that was asked was that the heart balance exactly against the feather of Maat. Budge’s account of the god’s duties is precise: he examines the tongue of the balance and keeps the beam level, he produces the heart for judgment, and he makes sure that a body in his charge is not handed over to the Eater of the Dead “by accident”. The role is older than the papyri. According to the Pyramid Texts, the Global Egyptian Museum says, he was responsible for counting the hearts, and sat with Thoth on the tribunal of the dead.

The imiut, his emblem

Before Osiris in the judgment hall, Erman notes, stands “the symbol of Anubis”, one of the emblems he found “difficult to explain”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls the object an imiut, “the one in the wrappings”, and its example from a Middle Kingdom tomb at Lisht South (14.3.19–.20) shows what it was: a linen form inside an animal skin, without head or hind legs, tied with linen strips to a staff that stands in a jar of ointment. The Met says such fetishes were first set protectively round sacred spaces and later shown beside funerary gods, especially Osiris. Howard Carter found two in Tutankhamun’s tomb and listed each as an “Anubis emblem upon pole and stand” (nos. 194 and 202).

Where you’ll see him

On the lids of chests: the Liverpool jackal came from a canopic chest, and the best known of all is Tutankhamun’s, Carter no. 261, a recumbent figure of the jackal Anubis on a shrine, with a sledge and carrying poles, and Carter listed another recumbent Anubis in a niche (no. 258). On amulets: Flinders Petrie catalogued figures of Anubis, “the god of the cemetery frequented by the jackals”, from the XXVIth dynasty to Roman times, two of them in place on the mummy’s chest. On grave stelae, in pairs: two jackals there, Budge says, are the openers of the ways for the dead in the kingdom of Osiris. And in the Book of the Dead, handing the dead a necklace and pectoral as he stands grasping his sceptre.

Anubis or Wepwawet?

Egypt had a second jackal god of the dead. Wepwawet, “Opener of the Ways”, was a jackal or desert fox whose standard led divine processions; his main cult was at Asyut, which the Greeks called Lykopolis, “Town of the Wolf”, and the British Museum’s guide calls him “the Wolf-god”. Budge says the two were once thought one god under two names, a view he saw no reason to hold. The Global Egyptian Museum’s descriptions give a rule of thumb: Wepwawet is often shown standing on a standard, Anubis lying on a shrine.