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
1912 Anubis 1912 Anubis 1912 Anubis, also designated , is a stony Koronian asteroid from the outer region of the asteroid belt, approximately 10 kilometers in diameter. It was named after the Egyptian deity Anubis, "Anubis" was discovered on September 24, 1960, by the Dutch and Dutch–American astronomers Ingrid and Cornelis van Houten at Leiden, and Tom Gehrels, who took the photographic plates at Palomar Observatory, California. On the same night, the trio of astronomers also discovered 1923 Osiris, 1924 Horus and 5011 Ptah, also named after Ancient Egyptian deities. The survey designation "P-L" stands for "Palomar–Leiden", named after Palomar Observatory and