Legends Library

Egyptian Legends

Anubis: The God of Mummification and the Afterlife

Anubis was the jackal-headed god of mummification, embalming, and the afterlife — the guide of souls and the weigher of hearts in the Hall of Two Truths.

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In the painted tombs of the Valley of the Kings, in the golden shrines of Tutankhamun, and in the prayers of ordinary Egyptians for three thousand years, one figure appears more often than almost any other: a slim, jackal-headed man, often painted in jet black, who kneels beside the mummy of the deceased or stands ready to lead the soul through the dangers of the night. His name is Anubis, and he is the god of mummification, embalming, and the journey of the dead.

More than any other Egyptian deity, Anubis is the friend of the dead. He invented the art of preserving the body when he embalmed the murdered Osiris. He guides the soul into the Hall of Two Truths. He weighs the heart of the deceased against the feather of truth. And he stands eternally at the gate of the underworld, ready to welcome those who have been judged worthy.

Iconography: The Jackal, the Black, the Tools of the Dead

Anubis is almost always depicted in human form with the head of a black jackal (the Canis aureus, the Egyptian jackal, although modern scholars sometimes identify the sacred animal as a type of wild dog or even a fox). The choice of this animal was not accidental. Jackals were the scavengers of the desert, prowling the edges of the cemeteries by night. The Egyptians saw them, at one and the same time, as threats to be warded off from the tombs of the dead and as the natural guardians of those tombs, lying upon the sand in the manner of Anubis upon his pedestal. In a brilliant piece of theological reversal, the dangerous creature was transformed into the protector of the dead.

The black color of Anubis has been explained in several ways. The Egyptians associated black with the rich silt of the Nile and with fertility, but the most common explanation is that the color was meant to evoke the discoloration of corpses after embalming, the dark, leathery tone of a body that has been prepared for eternity. Black, in other words, was the color of preserved flesh, and Anubis was the god who gave the flesh its eternal form.

In his hands, Anubis typically holds the flail (associated with Osiris, the lord of the underworld) and the ankh, the symbol of life. He is sometimes shown leading a mummy by the hand, sometimes kneeling over a mummy on a lion-shaped bier (the pose seen on the famous canopic chest of Tutankhamun), and sometimes standing upright at the entrance to the tomb. In later periods, he wears a collar of gold and precious stones, and his ears are long and pricked, alert to the slightest sound from the world of the dead.

The Embalmer of Osiris

Anubis’ most important role in the mythology of Egypt was the embalming of Osiris. After Isis had gathered the scattered pieces of her husband’s body — Set had dismembered Osiris into fourteen parts and flung them across Egypt — Anubis performed the first mummification. He wrapped the body in linen, recited the spells of preservation, and in doing so invented the entire art of embalming that would later be practiced on kings and commoners for three thousand years.

This single act made Anubis the patron of embalmers. In the real temples of Egypt, the priests who performed mummification were called imy-ut, “those who are in the place of embalming,” and they wore jackal masks during the seventy-day process to identify themselves with the god. The opening of the mouth ceremony, performed with sacred adzes at the conclusion of embalming, was traditionally credited to Anubis, who used it to give the mummy of Osiris the breath of life. From the Old Kingdom onward, the chief embalmer was titled hery seshta, “the one in charge of the secrets,” a direct echo of the god’s role as keeper of the sacred arts of death.

The Guide of Souls and the Weigher of Hearts

Anubis’ most famous role comes in the judgment scene that lies at the heart of the Egyptian afterlife. After the body has been mummified and the tomb sealed, the soul of the deceased must travel through the twelve hours of the night to reach the Hall of Two Truths, the great court of Osiris where the dead are judged.

At each stage of the journey, Anubis is present. He protects the soul from the serpents and demons that lurk in the Duat. He opens the gates of the underworld for those who know his name. And when the soul finally arrives at the Hall, it is Anubis who leads it before the throne of Osiris, who steadies the great golden scales on which the heart will be weighed against the white feather of Ma’at, the goddess of truth. The weighing of the heart, and the fate that follows it, is described at length in the weighing of the heart ceremony of the Book of the Dead.

If the heart is light — that is, balanced against the feather — Anubis leads the deceased to Osiris, who welcomes them into the Field of Reeds, the eternal paradise of Egyptian belief. If the heart is heavy with sin, the monstrous Ammit (the “Devourer,” part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus) consumes it, and the soul is destroyed.

Parentage: Son of Osiris or Son of Ra?

Egyptian mythology did not always agree on who Anubis’ parents were. The most common tradition, found in the Pyramid Texts and repeated by Plutarch in De Iside et Osiride, made him the son of Osiris and Nephthys, the quiet sister of Isis. In this story, Nephthys was the wife of Set, but Set found her with Osiris and in his rage turned her out. Anubis was born of this secret union, and Set would have destroyed him had Isis not found the infant and raised him as her own. This legend explained why Anubis was closely associated with both Isis and Nephthys, and why he inherited the chthonic (underworld) realm of his father Osiris rather than the storm-and-desert realm of Set.

A second tradition, found in some New Kingdom inscriptions, made Anubis the son of Ra, perhaps as a way of binding him more tightly to the sun god’s daily cycle. The two parentages were not seen as contradictory in Egyptian thought; the gods had many forms, and the theologians of the different temples and nomes each preserved their own version.

Temples and Cult Centers

Anubis was worshipped across Egypt, but his principal cult center was Cynopolis (Greek for “City of the Dogs”), called Per-Osiris in Egyptian, in the seventeenth nome of Upper Egypt. There, in the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom, his priests maintained a large necropolis in which mummified jackals were buried by the hundreds. Herodotus, visiting Egypt in the fifth century BCE, described the cult at Cynopolis in his Histories and noted that the inhabitants of the nome were forbidden to wear gold jewelry and to keep hunting dogs as pets, in honor of the god.

A second important center was the Anubeion at Saqqara, a temple complex just to the north of the Step Pyramid of Djoser, where embalming was performed in the immediate shadow of the greatest funerary monument of the Old Kingdom. The Anubeion contained a sequence of catacombs in which mummified dogs and jackals were buried by the thousands, in the hope that they would carry the prayers of the living to the god.

Anubis was also honored in the temples of other gods, especially at Abydos, the cult center of Osiris, and at Heliopolis, the city of Ra. In the New Kingdom, the cult of Anubis spread to the workers’ village of Deir el-Medina, the home of the artisans who built the royal tombs, and to the great temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, where a chapel was dedicated to him.

From Jackal God to Divine Messenger: The Development of Anubis

Anubis’ role evolved over the centuries. In the earliest texts, the Pyramid Texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, he appears as a fierce guardian of the necropolis, a “foremost of the westerners” (the name given to the dead in early Egyptian texts) who prowled the desert and protected the tombs. By the Middle Kingdom, with the spread of the Coffin Texts and the growth of Osiris’ cult, he had become the patron of embalmers and the conductor of souls. By the New Kingdom, in the golden age of the Book of the Dead, he was the indispensable weigher of the heart, the god who decided the eternal fate of every soul.

This evolution reflects a broader change in Egyptian religion. In the early periods, the afterlife was largely the prerogative of the king; only the pharaoh was thought to ascend to the stars or to join the sun barque. From the Middle Kingdom onward, through the democratization of the afterlife, the myths of Osiris and the rituals of the Book of the Dead were made available to anyone who could afford the proper spells. Anubis was the god of this new, broader afterlife.

Hermanubis: Anubis in the Greco-Roman World

When Egypt fell first to the Greeks under Alexander the Great (332 BCE) and then to the Romans under Augustus (30 BCE), Anubis joined the great wave of Egyptian gods to be identified with the gods of Greece and Rome. He was most often paired with Hermes, the Greek psychopomp (guide of souls), to form a new god called Hermanubis — a half-Greek, half-Egyptian deity who combined the caduceus of Hermes with the jackal head of Anubis.

Hermanubis was worshipped at the great temple of Marneion at Rome, at the Serapeum of Alexandria, and at cult centers throughout the Roman Empire. In his Greek form, Anubis appears in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (second century CE), where Lucius, the protagonist of The Golden Ass, is led to the throne of Isis by Anubis himself, the black dog who carries a staff and opens the way. Apuleius describes Anubis as “the messenger between the gods above and the gods below,” an image that perfectly captures the role he had played in Egypt for three thousand years.

The Jackal in the Modern Imagination

In modern popular culture, Anubis has become one of the most recognizable of all Egyptian gods. He appears in films, novels, and video games from The Mummy franchise to the Assassin’s Creed series, often as a mysterious, morally ambiguous figure. Most modern treatments rightly emphasize his connection to death and the afterlife, but they often miss the gentler side of his worship: the patience of the embalmer, the careful weighing of the heart, the willingness of the guide to lead the soul through the dangers of the night for those who have lived in truth.

That is the heart of Anubis in the Egyptian tradition. He is not a terrifying demon, not a force of cosmic judgment, but a faithful friend of the dead, the one who invented the arts by which the body is preserved and the soul is guided. From the first mummification of Osiris at the dawn of time, through the tombs of the pharaohs and the prayers of the workers’ village at Deir el-Medina, to the temples of Isis at Rome in the second century CE, Anubis has been the god who stands between the living and the dead, helping the soul to cross.

Last reviewed: June 2026.