In Egypt's
Early Dynastic period (), Anubis was portrayed in full animal form, with a "
jackal" head and body. A jackal god, probably Anubis, is depicted in stone inscriptions from the reigns of
Hor-Aha,
Djer, and other pharaohs of the
First Dynasty. Since
Predynastic Egypt, when the dead were buried in shallow graves, jackals had been strongly associated with cemeteries because they were scavengers that uncovered human bodies and ate their flesh. In the spirit of "fighting like with like," a jackal was chosen to protect the dead, because "a common problem (and cause of concern) must have been the digging up of bodies, shortly after burial, by jackals and other wild dogs which lived on the margins of the cultivation." In the
Old Kingdom, Anubis was the most important god of the dead. He was replaced in that role by Osiris during the
Middle Kingdom (2000–1700 BC). In the
Roman era, which started in 30 BC, tomb paintings depict him holding the hand of deceased persons to guide them to Osiris. The parentage of Anubis varied between myths, times and sources. In early mythology, he was portrayed as a son of
Ra. In the
Coffin Texts, which were written in the
First Intermediate Period (c. 2181–2055 BC), Anubis is the son of either the cow goddess
Hesat or the cat-headed
Bastet. Another tradition depicted him as the son of Ra and
Nephthys. More commonly, however, he is recognized as the offspring of Osiris and Isis. In later periods, particularly during the Ptolemaic era, Anubis was sometimes described as the son of Isis and Serapis, a Hellenized form of Osiris designed to appeal to Egypt's growing Greek population. The Greek
Plutarch (c. 40–120 AD) reported a tradition that Anubis was the illegitimate son of Nephthys and Osiris, but that he was adopted by Osiris's wife
Isis:
George Hart sees this story as an "attempt to incorporate the independent deity Anubis into the
Osirian pantheon." An Egyptian papyrus from the
Roman period (30–380 AD) simply called Anubis the "son of Isis." In
Nubia, Anubis was seen as the husband of his mother Nephthys. The two gods were considered similar because they both
guided souls to the afterlife. The center of this
cult was in
uten-ha/
Sa-ka/
Cynopolis, a place whose Greek name means "city of dogs." In Book XI of
The Golden Ass by
Apuleius, there is evidence that the worship of this god was continued in
Rome through at least the 2nd century. Indeed, Hermanubis also appears in the
alchemical and
hermetical literature of the
Middle Ages and the
Renaissance. Although the Greeks and
Romans typically scorned Egyptian animal-headed gods as bizarre and primitive (Anubis was mockingly called "Barker" by the Greeks), Anubis was sometimes associated with
Sirius in the heavens and
Cerberus and Hades in the underworld. In his dialogues,
Plato often has
Socrates utter oaths "by the dog" (
Greek:
kai me ton kuna), "by the dog of Egypt", and "by the dog, the god of the Egyptians", both for emphasis and to appeal to Anubis as an arbiter of truth in the underworld. ==Roles==