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
Head of Nefertem Head of Nefertem The Head of Nefertem (also known as the Head from the Lotus Bloom or Tutankhamun as the Sun God) was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62) in the Valley of the Kings in West Thebes. It depicts the King (Pharaoh) as a child and dates from the 18th dynasty (New Kingdom). The object received the find number of 8 and today is displayed with the inventory number JE 60723 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The discovery of the Head of Nefertem is controversial, since Howard Carter did not document the piece in his excavation journal.