Who Was Anubis in Egyptian Mythology?
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
If you want to know who was Anubis in Egyptian mythology, picture a tall figure with the head of a black jackal, standing calmly beside a set of scales. Anubis guided the dead, protected their bodies and oversaw the most important test in the Egyptian afterlife. He was feared less than you might expect, and trusted more.
Why a jackal
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.
Weighing the heart
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 was lighter than 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.
What Anubis actually did
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
How his role changed over time
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.
How we know about Anubis
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.
The takeaway
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.