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
The Anubis Gates with the "New Coinage" as a plot twist in her 1954 novel "The Toll-Gate". "The Anubis Gates" was chosen for Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks (appearing as #47). Cheryl Morgan lists the novel among "12 Classic Steampunk Books." Chris Henderson reviews the book favorably in the December 1983 issue of "Dragon Magazine". He calls it "one of the best books to appear on the shelves this year". Noting it is "one of those rare books - a solid mainstream fantasy novel", Henderson recommends it...". Algis Budrys declared that Powers "supplies the one thing the reader has to have -- and never more