Real, but the surviving record is thin or comes from one period only. In the record from the very beginning.
Wepwawet wp-wꜣwt
the Opener of the Ways, and the other jackal
The figure, plainly
The other jackal, and his name is a job
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.
There are two jackals in Egyptian funerary art, and almost everybody who looks at them assumes there is one.
You can see the pair on grave markers — two canids, drawn together, deliberately distinguished. One is Anubis. The other is Wepwawet, and his name is not a name at all. It is a job description.
Opener of the ways.
Watch a jackal and the name explains itself
This is not a metaphor about spiritual guidance. It is a description of what the animal does.
A jackal — or the wolf-like canid the Egyptians were actually looking at — goes ahead. It moves out in front, takes the line, and the route exists behind it. Put that animal on a standard and carry the standard at the head of a procession, and you have made the behaviour into an office.
That is exactly how he appears: on a pole, out front, before the boat and before the king. The road is not something he knows about. The road is something that happens because he went first.
Two jackals, two halves of the country
The pairing with Anubis turns out to be geographical.
The sources say the two jackals on grave markers are connected with the northern and southern parts of the world of the dead — and a scene in the underworld books makes it concrete. A boat carries the crown of Upper Egypt at the prow and the crown of Lower Egypt at the stern, and between them stand two sceptres, said to stand for the two jackal-headed gods, one of the South and one of the North.
So: two jackals, two halves of the country of the dead, one each. Egypt was administered as two lands for its entire history, and it turns out the cemetery was too.
Which of them got the South is a question the sources set up and never answer. It is a very Egyptian kind of loose end — the system is stated, the assignment is not.
He does not lead the king anywhere. He launches him.
The oldest thing said about him is also the strangest, and it sat unread for a long time because it was printed under a spelling nobody was searching for.
In the Pyramid Texts — carved inside a Fifth Dynasty pyramid, which makes this one of the oldest religious documents on earth — the dead king Unas is cleared of every accusation, and then:
Upuatu hath made Unas fly up to heaven among his brethren the gods.
And Unas draws his arms in like a goose and beats his wings like a falcon, flying, flying.
Every other passage has this god going ahead on the ground. Here he does not lead the king anywhere. He gets him off the ground. Opening the way, at the very beginning of the record, meant opening it upward.
A road, and then a body that works
The other passage is two thousand years younger and unimprovably plain:
Upuat openeth a prosperous road for thee. Thou seest with thine eyes, thou hearest with thine ears, thou speakest with thy mouth, thou walkest with thy legs.
Read those two sentences as one thought, because they are one. The road opens, and then the senses come back — sight, hearing, speech, and legs to walk the road with.
This is a religion in which the dead need a functioning body, and the god who opens the way is in the same sentence as the restoration of the equipment for using it. Nobody is being led somewhere symbolically. Somebody is being got up and got moving.
He kept getting filed under Anubis
The book most of this comes from introduces him as "another form of Anubis," and then — in the same paragraph — describes the two-jackal grave markers that prove the Egyptians drew them apart.
It is a pattern worth naming, because it happens to several gods here. A nineteenth-century scholar with a filing system meets a local god who resembles a bigger one, and files him as a version of it. The Egyptians, who had the two of them standing on either side of a boat holding different sceptres, evidently disagreed.
The same source also says the two are "often confounded" — which, read carefully, is a complaint about scribes and scholars, not a claim about the gods.
He was the Opener of the Ways for at least two thousand years, under four different spellings, and he has spent the modern era being mistaken for his colleague.
Overview
His name is a job. Budge translates it directly:
Another form of Anubis was the god Ap-uat, the … of the pyramid texts, or "Opener of the ways," who also was depicted in the form of a jackal; and the two gods are often confounded. [budge-1895]
Opener of the ways — not a metaphor for guidance but a description of what a jackal does in front of a procession. He goes ahead on a standard, and the road exists behind him.
Two jackals, and they are not the same jackal
The most useful thing in the archive is that the Egyptians drew both:
On sepulchral stelae and other monuments two jackals are frequently depicted; one of these represents Anubis, and the other Ap-uat, and they probably have some connexion with the northern and southern parts of the funereal world. [budge-1895]
The Am-Tuat confirms the division geographically. In the Second Division's lizard boat, the prow carries the crown of the South and the stern the crown of the North, and between them stand two sceptres "which symbolize the gods Anpu and Ap-uat, i.e., the jackal-headed gods of the South and North" [budge-1905].
So: two jackals, two halves of the country of the dead. Wepwawet is the southern one. See anubis, and the Second Division.
Where he stands
In the boat. He is one of the three deities standing in front of the shrine in the Sektet boat through the First Division, with Sa and the Lady of the Boat [budge-1905] — and again in the Second, where two serpents named Isis and Nephthys take position immediately before him.
Among the praisers. In the First Division's nine "gods who praise Ra," the second trio is jackal-headed: Neb-ta-tesher, Ap-uat, Ap-sekhemti [budge-1905].
At Abydos, beside Osiris. BD chapter XVIII names "the divine chiefs great in Abydos — Osiris is, Isis is, and Ap-uat is" [budge-1895]. He is third in a list of three, and the other two are the two most famous gods in Egypt.
In the body of the dead. The spell that identifies each limb with a god gives him the face: "His face is the face of Ap-uat, his eyes are the great ones among the souls of Annu, his nose is Thoth, his mouth is the great lake…" [budge-1895].
He opens the way upward, and he opens it in the Pyramid Texts
Budge said Ap-uat was "the … of the pyramid texts" and printed a sign instead of a citation. The passage was in a book already on disk, under a fourth spelling:
There is no [evil] word concerning Unas on earth among men. There is no hostile speech about him with the gods. Unas hath destroyed his word, he hath ascended to heaven. Upuatu hath made Unas fly up to heaven among his brethren the gods. Unas hath drawn together his arms like the Smen goose, he striketh his wings like a falcon, flying, flying. [budge-1914]
This dates him to the Old Kingdom on a text, not on inference. And note what he opens: not a road through the underworld but the way up. The king is not led anywhere — he is made to fly, and Wepwawet is the one who does it.
The second passage is the name doing its job in the plainest possible sentence, from the Book of Breathings:
Upuat openeth a prosperous road for thee. Thou seest with thine eyes, thou hearest with thine ears, thou speakest with thy mouth, thou walkest with thy legs. [budge-1914]
A road, and then a body that works. The opening of the way and the restoration of the senses are the same sentence — which is the strongest evidence in this entry that his function was understood literally rather than as a title.
Budge files him under Anubis, and that is now a pattern
"Another form of Anubis was the god Ap-uat." Budge said the same of heryshaf and banebdjedet, both filed as forms of Khnemu. Three independent gods with their own cults, each subordinated in his arrangement to a larger one they resemble (see C373, C376).
He also undercuts it in the same sentence: the two "are often confounded" — which is a statement about scholars and scribes confusing them, not about the gods being one. And the two-jackal iconography he describes immediately afterwards is evidence that the Egyptians distinguished them.
The entry records his filing and does not adopt it.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[budge-1895] | *Papyrus of Ani*, introduction on Anubis | **Ap-uat**, "**Opener of the ways**," of the **pyramid texts**; jackal form; "the two gods are often confounded" |
[budge-1895] | *ibid.* | **two jackals on sepulchral stelae** — one Anubis, one Ap-uat — connected with "the northern and southern parts of the funereal world" |
[budge-1895] | *ibid.*, the members-identification spell | "**His face is the face of Ap-uat**" |
[budge-1895] | BD ch. XVIII | "the divine chiefs great in **Abydos** — Osiris is, Isis is, and **Ap-uat** is" |
[budge-1905] | *Book of Am-Tuat* I, First Division | **Ap-uat** before the shrine in the Sektet boat, with Sa and the Lady of the Boat |
[budge-1905] | *ibid.*, First Division, the nine who praise Ra | the jackal-headed trio **Neb-ta-tesher, Ap-uat, Ap-sekhemti** |
[budge-1905] | *ibid.*, Second Division, the lizard boat | the sceptres of **Anpu and Ap-uat**, "the jackal-headed gods of the **South and North**," between the two crowns |
[budge-1914] | *Literature of the Ancient Egyptians*, the **Pyramid Texts of Unas**, p. 21 | "**Upuatu hath made Unas fly up to heaven** among his brethren the gods" — **the Old Kingdom attestation** |
[budge-1914] | *ibid.*, the **Book of Breathings**, p. 61 | "**Upuat openeth a prosperous road for thee**," followed immediately by the restoration of sight, hearing, speech and walking |
Sources
[budge-1895]— Budge, The Book of the Dead: Papyrus of Ani. Public domain, archived. Budge subordinates him to Anubis and immediately describes iconography that distinguishes them.[budge-1905]— Budge, The Book of Am-Tuat (1905), vol. I. Public domain, archived.[budge-1914]— Budge, Literature of the Ancient Egyptians. Public domain, archived. Spells the name Upuat / Upuatu, which is why these two passages went unfound for so long; recovered by merging theup-uatucensus stub (C386).
Open questions
- Which is the southern jackal? Budge says the pair map to north and south and that the two are "probably" connected with those halves — his hedge. The Am-Tuat passage names Anpu and Ap-uat with the crowns of South and North but does not say which sceptre is which.
- Asyut / Lycopolis. The census makes him tutelary god of Asyut, which is the standard identification. No archived source here says so — Budge locates him by function and pairing, never by city. Recorded as unconfirmed.
- "Connected with warfare" — also from the census, also unattested here.
- ~~Get the Pyramid Texts occurrence.~~ Closed 2026-07-30. Budge's Literature of the Ancient Egyptians gives it in translation, in the Unas text: "Upuatu hath made Unas fly up to heaven." Still wanted: the numbered Pyramid Text line, which Budge does not supply — Sethe or Faulkner would give it.
- Why does he make the king fly? Every other passage in this entry has him going ahead on the ground, on a standard, in a boat. The Unas text has him launching the king upward. Establish whether "opening the way" covered vertical travel from the start, or whether the Old Kingdom sense was different from the New Kingdom one.
- The Book of Breathings passage is Late Period and sits at the far end of his attested range. With Unas at the near end, he spans roughly two thousand years under one job description — worth stating precisely once the dates are checked.
- Ap-sekhemti, the third jackal-headed god of the praising trio, is named once and nowhere else. Check the census.
- Establish whether Wepwawet and Anubis were ever addressed together in one text as two beings, which would settle the "often confounded" question from the Egyptian side.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ◐partial — Genuinely attested, but the record is thin or single-period.
"Wepwawet", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded partial, retrieved 2026-08-10.