Ancient Egyptian deities purposes. Egyptian texts often refer to deities' true, underlying forms as "mysterious". The Egyptians' visual representations of their gods are therefore not literal. They symbolize specific aspects of each deity's character, functioning much like the ideograms in hieroglyphic writing. For this reason, the funerary god Anubis is commonly shown in Egyptian art as a dog or jackal, a creature whose scavenging habits threaten the preservation of buried mummies, in an effort to counter this threat and employ it for protection. His black coloring alludes to the color of mummified flesh and to the fertile black soil that Egyptians saw as
Shu (Egyptian god) and defender as the sun god does he sometimes receive a lion's head. He carries an ankh, the symbol of life. Shu (Egyptian god) Shu (Egyptian for "emptiness" and "he who rises up") was one of the primordial Egyptian gods, a personification of dry air, spouse and counterpart to goddess Tefnut and one of the nine deities of the Ennead of the Heliopolis cosmogony. In Heliopolitan theology, Atum created the first couple of the Ennead, Shu and Tefnut by masturbating or by spitting. Shu was the father of Nut and Geb and grandfather of Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. His