Description

Amulet representing the god Anubis as a walking, jackal-headed human figure.

Anubis Amulets

The earliest jackel-form amulet, made of bone, was found in a predynastic Naqqada II burial and shows the animal in the “couching” position. By the sixth dynasty, jackal-headed human walking figures made their first appearance.
Jackal-form Anubis as an amulet would have been worn only by the dead. The jackal was a dangerous force to be propitiated, since its chief activity was prowling around desert cemeteries, seeking bones to crunch or skulking around embalmers’ storage rooms in the hope of carrying off a well-salted limb from an unsupervised corpse as it lay drying out in natron. According to ancient Egyptian beliefs, the destruction of the body prevented resurrection. Anubis was therefore deified as god of embalming, seeking in this way the protection of the very object he would by nature attack.

• Carol Andrews, Egyptian Mummies (London: British Museum Press, 1984).
• Mona Serry, ed., Bibliotheca Alexandrina: Antiquities Museum, introduction by Ismail Serageldin (Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Antiquities Museum, 2015): 51, 312.