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
Creature type (Dungeons & Dragons) a change to an animal creature that increases its Intelligence or grants it additional abilities, the designer is encouraged to also change the creature's type, usually from animal to magical beast. When real world animals are rendered as vermin (see below) in D&D, they have no Intelligence scores at all. In 3rd edition, the beast type was used for nonhistoric and fantastic, but not necessarily magical vertebrates. The beast type was merged into the animal type in 3.5 edition. A construct is either an animated object of some sort, or an artificially crafted creature. Most construct are mindless automatons, obeying