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
Anubis Shrine linen gauze tied at the front of the neck. A scarf was wound around the neck of the figure, with lotus and cornflowers woven into it, tied in a loop behind the head. Between its front legs was an inscribed tablet with the name of Akhenaten's eldest daughter, Meritaten. The statue of Anubis was separated from the roof of the shrine on 25 October 1926 so that it could be transported through the grave chamber unscathed, out of the tomb and to the laboratory the next day, together with the shrine on the palanquin. An Anubis statue found in the