Well documented. Several independent sources across different periods. In the record from the very beginning.
Anubis jnpw
he who is upon his mountain, lord of the embalming booth
The myth, retold
The story as it is told
A retelling, not a translation. What follows is the story as it is commonly told, drawn together from the better popular and scholarly accounts. It is not keyed to any single ancient text, and the ancient sources rarely agree with each other as neatly as a retelling has to. The attested record — with its sources, its gaps, and its disagreements — is below.
Anubis is the one who does the actual work.
Osiris rules the dead, which is a position. Anubis handles them — the body, the chemicals, the seventy days, the wrapping, the cemetery out on the desert edge. If Egyptian death religion were an institution, Osiris would be on the letterhead and Anubis would be the one who knows where everything is kept.
He used to have the top job
Here is the part most people do not know. In the Old Kingdom, Anubis was the god of the dead. Not an assistant — the principal. The standard offering formula, the one carved on tomb after tomb, invoked him. Osiris was not yet running that department.
Then Osiris rose, and Anubis was demoted.
Except he was not discarded, which is the interesting bit. He was reassigned. He kept embalming, kept the necropolis, and took a specific technical role at the judgment: the god who operates the balance. Thoth records the verdict, Osiris presides, Anubis handles the equipment.
Egyptian religion absorbed a major theological shift by giving the displaced god a job. Nobody was written out. He just stopped being in charge and started being essential, which is a very recognisable kind of career.
A god made from the animals that dug up graves
The animal is usually called a jackal. It is more likely the African golden wolf — a species only separated from the golden jackal by genetic work in the 2010s, which is a startlingly recent date for a fact about a four-thousand-year-old god.
Either way, the point is what it did. These animals hung around desert cemeteries, because desert cemeteries are where the food is. Egyptians watched canids digging at the edge of their graveyards and made the canid the guardian of graveyards.
That is not resignation, it is strategy. The thing that threatens the dead is promoted to the thing that protects them, and now it is on your side.
The black is not gloom
He is painted black, and black is not the colour of the animal.
Black in Egyptian art is the colour of the Nile silt after the flood — the richest soil in the world, the stuff that made the country possible. It is a fertility colour. It means what things come out of, not what things end in.
Osiris is painted black for the same reason.
So the jackal is black because he belongs to the process of regeneration, and every horror film that has used that silhouette to mean death has had it exactly backwards.
Men wore his face
The best evidence for what Anubis actually meant is not a myth. It is a mask.
At least one survives — a hollow ceramic jackal head, big enough to go over a man's head, with holes at the neck to see through. A priest put that on and became Anubis for the duration of the embalming.
So the rite was not about the god. It was performed as the god. Somebody's father is on the table, and the person handling him has stopped being a man from the village.
He is also, in the New Kingdom, the god whose name is on the imiut — a headless animal skin hung from a pole in a pot, which is exactly as strange an object as it sounds and appears beside him for three thousand years without anyone explaining it.
He is not sinister
Modern culture made Anubis a horror figure — the death god, the one at the end of the corridor. There is essentially nothing in the sources to support it.
Read what he actually does and he is closer to a mortician and a night watchman: he prepares the body carefully, he stands at the cemetery edge, he holds the scale steady, and he does not have opinions about your character. Thoth writes it down. Ammit eats the failures.
Anubis just makes sure the work is done properly.
Overview
Anubis is the god of the practical business of death — the body, the wrapping, the chemistry, the cemetery. Where Osiris rules the dead, Anubis handles them.
His history contains one of the clearest demotions in the Egyptian record. In the Old Kingdom he is the pre-eminent funerary god. As Osiris rises, Anubis does not disappear but is reassigned: from ruler of the dead to the specialist who prepares them and attends the scale. The tradition absorbed a major theological change by giving the displaced god a job rather than discarding him, which is characteristic of how Egyptian religion handled competition.
Attestation history
Old Kingdom. Anubis is the dominant mortuary god. He is named constantly in Old Kingdom offering formulae — the standard ḥtp-dj-nsw formula invokes him — and he appears throughout the Pyramid Texts [sethe-1908]. At this stage Osiris is not yet the presiding figure of the funerary cult.
Middle Kingdom onward — the reassignment. Osiris becomes lord of the dead. Anubis becomes the god of embalming and the guardian of the necropolis, and in later tradition is made Osiris's subordinate and, in Plutarch's version, his son by Nephthys [plutarch-iside].
New Kingdom. In Book of the Dead vignettes Anubis attends the balance, adjusting the scale at the weighing of the heart [budge-1901; budge-1895]. The role is technical: he operates the instrument, Thoth records the result.
What the texts say
Lord of the embalming booth. Anubis presides over mummification. Priests performing the embalming wore Anubis masks, taking the god's part in the procedure; a surviving example is in the collection at Hildesheim. The rite was understood as repeating what Anubis did for Osiris.
Attending the scale. At the judgment he leads the deceased in and tends the balance. If the heart fails, Ammit is waiting.
Guardian of the necropolis. His epithets are locational and vivid: tepy-dju-ef, "he who is upon his mountain" — the jackal on the desert cliff above the cemetery — and khenty-seh-netjer, "foremost of the divine booth."
Iconography
A black canid, usually shown recumbent with ears erect, or a canid-headed man. The animal is conventionally called a jackal; it is more likely based on the African golden wolf, an animal only distinguished from the golden jackal by genetic work in the 2010s. Either way, the referent is the dog-like scavenger that frequented desert cemeteries — a god made from the animal that dug up graves, set to guard them.
The black is deliberate and is not the animal's natural colour: black is the colour of the fertile Nile silt and of the mummified body, signifying regeneration rather than gloom. He shares this colouring logic with Osiris.
The imiut fetish — a headless stuffed animal skin hung from a pole in a pot — is his emblem and is attested from the Early Dynastic period.
Not to be confused with Wepwawet, "opener of the ways," a separate standing canid god of Asyut, usually grey or white, with whom Anubis is constantly conflated in popular sources.
Cult and practice
Cynopolis — the Greek name means "dog city" — was a principal centre. Anubis had no great temple complex on the scale of Karnak or Edfu; his presence was at the cemetery, which is where the work was. Enormous dog and canid catacombs have been excavated at Saqqara, containing very large numbers of mummified animals dedicated as votives.
In the Roman period he remains popular, and appears in a hybrid form, Hermanubis, fusing him with Hermes as a guide of souls.
Reception
Anubis is probably the most visually recognisable Egyptian god in modern culture, and is almost always cast as sinister — a death-god in the horror register. That reading has little support in the sources, where his role is protective and craftsmanlike. He is closer to a mortician and a night watchman than to a reaper.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[sethe-1908] | Pyramid Texts; Old Kingdom offering formulae | pre-eminent early mortuary role |
[budge-1901] | Book of the Dead, judgment scenes | attendance at the balance |
[budge-1895] | Papyrus of Ani vignette | iconography at the weighing |
[plutarch-iside] | *De Iside et Osiride* | late genealogy as son of Osiris and Nephthys |
Sources
[sethe-1908]— Sethe, Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte (1908–22). Public domain.[budge-1901]— Budge, trans., Egyptian Literature (1901). Public domain. Budge caveat applies.[budge-1895]— Budge, The Papyrus of Ani (1895). Public domain; used for the plate.[plutarch-iside]— Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, trans. King (1908). Public domain.[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open questions
- Cite the Hildesheim Anubis mask by museum number.
- Get an excavation reference and a quantity figure for the Saqqara dog catacombs.
- Confirm the African golden wolf identification against the published genetic work rather than a popular summary.
- Date the reassignment from lord of the dead to embalmer as precisely as the evidence allows.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ●full — Multiple attestations across periods.
"Anubis", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded full, retrieved 2026-08-10.