God of Embalming and the Necropolis
Anubis appears as a recumbent black jackal or a jackal-headed man. The black is the color of embalming resin and of the Nile's fertile silt, both signs of rebirth after death, rather than the sandy coat of any real desert canid. His standing epithets include 'He who is upon his mountain,' the watcher overlooking the necropolis, and 'Foremost of the Westerners,' chief of the dead, a title that later passed to Osiris. In the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts he is the principal funerary god, attested before the rise of the Osiris cult.
In myth, after Set dismembered Osiris it was Anubis who rejoined the pieces, wrapped them in linen, and treated them with unguents, producing the first mummy and fixing the divine pattern for the embalmer's craft. The actual rite reenacted the scene: the officiating priest wore a jackal mask of Anubis while working on the corpse. In the judgment scene of Book of the Dead spell 125, Anubis leads the deceased by the hand into the Hall of Two Truths, then crouches beside the balance, adjusting the plummet and checking the weights so that heart and feather are measured exactly.
One of his cult centers was Cynopolis, 'city of dogs,' in Middle Egypt, and the Anubieion sanctuary at Saqqara received millions of mummified dogs as offerings in the Late Period.
