Anubis

Definition

Anubis (Egyptian Anpu, "khenty-imentiu" — Foremost of the Westerners) is the jackal-headed Egyptian god of embalming and of the burial. Before Osiris rose to prominence he was the most important funerary god, the guide of the dead into the west and through the Duat, the underworld the Sun crosses each night. His place in Egyptian astral religion is indirect: he belongs to the funerary cosmology in which the deceased's journey is mapped onto the night sky, rather than to any single star or constellation.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read Anubis as Egypt's original god of the dead, whose link to burial likely grew from desert canines scavenging in early shallow graves — a threat turned into protection in funerary magic. As the cult of Osiris rose, Anubis was folded into it: he became the embalmer who wrapped Osiris's body, and his role widened from the royal dead to all the dead.

In Practice

In an Egyptian-tradition glossary, Anubis sits at the funerary edge of the astral material rather than at its centre. He is the embalmer and the guide who leads the dead into the west and the Duat — the same underworld the night Sun and Osiris travel through before dawn — so his domain is the destination that all the funerary star-lore describes, even though no specific constellation is assigned to him in this corpus. His parentage was told in several ways: son of Hesat or of Bastet in the Coffin Texts, or, in Plutarch's later account, son of Nephthys by Osiris and adopted by Isis. Because the corpus here treats him through his embalming and Duat-guide roles rather than a stellar identity, this entry stays deliberately brief and does not claim a star-association the sources do not support.

Historical Origin

Anubis is attested from the Old Kingdom: prayers on funerary stelae and mastaba-tomb walls were addressed to him, and he is named dozens of times in the Pyramid Texts in connection with the king's burial. His assimilation to the Osiris cult, where he is made Osiris's son and embalmer, follows in later periods. Standard reference: Richard H. Wilkinson, *The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt* (2003).

Further Reading

• Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt