Who Was Anubis in Egyptian Mythology?

Anubis was the god of mummification and the protector of graves. The jackal head is not a random choice. Real jackals were often seen around desert cemeteries, so the Egyptians linked the animal with the dead and then made it a guardian rather than a threat.

His skin is usually shown black in Egyptian art, which stood for the rich soil of the Nile and for rebirth. In Egyptian mythology black was a hopeful colour, not a gloomy one, and Anubis carried that meaning with him.

The most famous scene involving Anubis is the weighing of the heart. The dead person's heart was placed on one side of a scale and a feather of truth on the other. Anubis adjusted the balance while the god Thoth recorded the result.

If the heart balanced against the feather, the person could continue into the afterlife. If it was heavier, weighed down by wrongdoing, a waiting creature devoured it. Egyptian mythology treated this as the moment that mattered most, and Anubis was the one who made sure the test was fair.

Across Egyptian mythology, Anubis had several connected jobs:

• •He invented and oversaw mummification
• •He guarded tombs and burial grounds
• •He led souls to the hall of judgement
• •He steadied the scales during the weighing of the heart

In the earliest periods Anubis was the main god of the dead. Later, as the worship of Osiris grew, Anubis became the one who prepared and guided rather than the one who ruled the afterlife. Egyptian mythology often works like this, with roles shifting as different centres of worship rose.

Priests preparing a body sometimes wore an Anubis mask, stepping into his role for the ritual. That detail shows how practical Egyptian mythology could be. The god was not distant, he was present in the work being done.

Almost everything known about Anubis comes from three kinds of source: tomb paintings, funerary texts and the physical evidence of mummification itself. The Book of the Dead, a collection of spells placed with the deceased, describes the weighing of the heart directly and shows Anubis at the scales.

Because these texts were produced over roughly two thousand years, they let researchers track how his role shifted. Egyptian religion is often presented as static, but comparing early pyramid texts with later material reveals a tradition that was continually reorganised while keeping its central figures.

Egyptologists usually describe Anubis as jackal headed, but the animal behind the image is harder to pin down than the label suggests. Egyptian artists drew a lean black canine with long pointed ears and a bushy tail, a mix of features that fits several wild dogs of the region. Greek writers linked him with dogs, and the city they named Cynopolis, meaning 'dog city', was a centre of his worship. Most of the millions of animal mummies offered to him in catacombs at Saqqara turned out to be ordinary dogs, not wild jackals.

Modern genetics has added a twist. In 2015 researchers concluded that the canine long called the golden jackal in Egypt and North Africa is actually a separate species more closely related to wolves, now often called the African golden wolf. This does not change anything about Egyptian belief, since the Egyptians grouped animals by appearance and behaviour rather than by DNA. It does show a useful lesson: the English words used to translate ancient ideas can quietly carry modern assumptions that the original culture never shared.

Egyptian sources do not agree on who Anubis's parents were. Some early texts link him with Ra or with the cat goddess Bastet, while a widely known later tradition, recorded by the Greek writer Plutarch, makes him the son of Osiris and Nephthys, raised by Isis. This fits Anubis's role in the Osiris myth, where he helps prepare and wrap Osiris's body, making him the model for every embalmer who came after. Such variation was normal in Egyptian religion, which allowed several family trees to exist side by side.

His titles describe what he did. He was called he who is upon his mountain, picturing him watching over the cemetery from the desert cliffs, and lord of the sacred land, meaning the burial ground. Another title linked him with the tent or booth where bodies were embalmed. One of the best known images of him came from Tutankhamun's tomb, where a large wooden figure of a black jackal lying on a shrine was placed at the entrance to the treasury, guarding the king's possessions.

Not every dog-headed figure in Egyptian art is Anubis. Wepwawet, whose name means opener of the ways, was another canine god, linked with the city of Asyut, which the Greeks later called Lycopolis, or wolf city. He is often shown standing on a tall standard carried at the front of royal processions, clearing a path for the king in war and for the dead on their journey. Anubis, by contrast, is usually shown either lying alert on top of a shrine or chest, or bending over a mummy laid on an embalming bed.

A third candidate appears on canopic jars, the containers that held organs removed during mummification. Their lids often represent the four sons of Horus, and one of them, Duamutef, has a jackal's head and guarded the stomach. Museum visitors sometimes mistake these lids for Anubis. Later, in Greek and Roman Egypt, Anubis was sometimes merged with the Greek god Hermes, who also escorted souls to the underworld, producing a combined figure called Hermanubis. Checking the setting, the pose and any accompanying hieroglyphs is usually the surest way to tell which god an artist intended.

When the worship of Isis spread around the Mediterranean in Greek and Roman times, Anubis travelled with her, and reactions were mixed. Some Romans found a dog-headed god absurd or alarming. The poet Virgil, describing the battle of Actium, pictured the gods of Egypt fighting against those of Rome and called Anubis the barker. The satirist Juvenal later mocked a priest dressed as Anubis leading crowds of shaven-headed, linen-clad worshippers through the streets. To these writers, Anubis represented everything foreign about Egyptian religion, and they used him to sharpen the contrast with Rome's own dignified gods.

Yet the cult kept its followers. In the novel known as The Golden Ass, written in the second century, Apuleius describes a festival procession for Isis in which a figure of Anubis appears with a black and gold face, carrying a herald's staff and a palm branch. The historian Josephus tells a scandalous story from the reign of Tiberius, in which a young man disguised himself as Anubis inside a temple of Isis to deceive a woman, after which the emperor punished the priests involved. Whether or not every detail is true, it shows how familiar Anubis had become in Rome itself.

Anubis in Egyptian mythology is the jackal headed guardian of the dead, the inventor of mummification and the steady hand at the scales, which made him one of the most trusted figures in the whole Egyptian afterlife.