Anubis is an Egyptian funerary god associated with embalming and the protection of the dead. Artists represented him either as a canine or as a man with a canine head. His watchful appearance is important: a god connected with burial is not necessarily a god who causes death. In the objects and texts discussed here, Anubis prepares, protects, and guides.
Three kinds of evidence help explain him: surviving Egyptian images, museum research on funerary objects, and a later account by the Greek writer Plutarch. These sources illuminate different aspects of the god; they should not be flattened into one timeless biography.
The watchful canine
A limestone statue in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows Anubis entirely in animal form, lying down with his head raised. The museum records that it was originally painted black and dates it to the end of the Late Period or the Ptolemaic Period, 343–30 BCE. Its precise date and original placement are uncertain.
The statue came from North Saqqara’s Sacred Animal Necropolis. The museum suggests a possible connection with embalming pavilions, while explicitly treating that placement as a hypothesis. This is a useful distinction: the object survives, but the reconstruction of exactly how it was used remains an interpretation.
Embalming and care for the dead
The Met’s educator guide to Egyptian art describes Anubis as a protector of mummies during the passage toward renewed life. Its discussion of a painted wooden statuette, object 38.5, explains the god’s raised hands as gestures of purification and transformation over a mummy. The guide also describes priests impersonating Anubis with jackal masks during burial rites.
Read in that context, the animal head does not make him a monster. It identifies the divine presence associated with the work of funerary protection. Modern images that emphasize menace alone can obscure that role.
What happens at the weighing of the heart?
The judgment scene in Hunefer’s Book of the Dead makes Anubis’s responsibilities especially clear. The British Museum identifies him twice: first leading Hunefer toward the balance, then kneeling beside it to adjust its plumb-weight. Hunefer’s heart occupies one scale-pan; the feather associated with Maat occupies the other.
Anubis does not perform every action in the scene. The ibis-headed Thoth records the outcome, and Horus subsequently brings Hunefer before the enthroned Osiris. Isis and Nephthys stand behind Osiris, while the composite creature Ammit waits below the balance.
This sequence is more informative than calling Anubis simply “the judge of the dead.” Guidance, the weighing, recording, and reception are distributed among several figures. Nor does the scene present Osiris and Anubis as interchangeable gods: both have distinct places within it.
Whose son is Anubis in Plutarch’s account?
In section 14 of On Isis and Osiris, Plutarch relates that Osiris fathered a child with Nephthys after mistaking her for Isis. Nephthys abandoned the infant because she feared Typhon, the name Plutarch uses in this narrative. Isis searched for the child, with dogs helping her find him.
The rescued child became Anubis, Isis’s attendant and guardian. Plutarch explicitly compares his protection of the gods with the way dogs protect people. The story therefore connects his animal identity with loyalty and guardianship, not merely with a family tree.
This should be identified as Plutarch’s account, rather than presented as the sole genealogy accepted everywhere in ancient Egypt. A literary narrative and an Egyptian funerary image answer different questions: one explains relationships through a story, while the other shows the god acting within the hoped-for passage of the dead.
Reading Anubis with the evidence in view
For a grounded understanding, start with what a particular source actually shows. The Saqqara statue presents a vigilant animal; the statuette discussed by the Met emphasizes funerary rites; Hunefer’s papyrus places Anubis beside the scales; Plutarch tells a story of rescue and protective service. Together, these examples make Anubis more specific—and more interesting—than a generic dark ruler of an Egyptian underworld.