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
Bata (god) New Kingdom Papyrus D’Orbiney, where he is the brother of Anubis. He is also mentioned in the Ptolemaic Papyrus Jumilhac. Bata (god) Bata from Saka is an Egyptian bull-god of the New Kingdom, who represents together with his brother Anubis the 17th Upper Egyptian Nome. Until the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty Bata was represented as a ram and later as a bull. Bata is probably identical with the death god "Bt" of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, known from the Saqqara necropolis, for instance from the Mastaba of Ti. Bata is not mentioned in the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts.