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
Anubis (cipher) Anubis (cipher) Anubis is a block cipher designed by Vincent Rijmen and Paulo S. L. M. Barreto as an entrant in the NESSIE project, a former research program initiated by the European Commission in 2000 for the identification of new cryptographic algorithms. Although the cipher has not been included in the final NESSIE portfolio, its design is considered very strong, and no attacks have been found by 2004 after the project had been concluded. The cipher is not patented and has been released by the designers for free public use. Anubis operates on data blocks of 128 bits, accepting keys