Cynopolis and the Silence After: Anubis's Historic Cult

Anubis's historic worship centered on Hardai, the city the Greeks called Cynopolis, City of the Dog, in Middle Egypt, a name that itself records the strength of his cult there; the animal necropolises of jackals and dogs excavated at the site, near what is now the modern town of El Qeis, are physical evidence of a real, sustained local devotion rather than literary description alone. The Greek geographer Strabo records that a formal, publicly organized feeding of the sacred dogs was maintained there, and Plutarch preserves an account of the town's residents going to war with a neighboring nome after its people ate the fish the Cynopolites held sacred, in revenge for an old insult to their own dogs, a rivalry serious enough to survive as a byword for pointless local feuding among later Greek and Roman writers. His broader cult reached across Egypt wherever mummification was practiced, since every embalmer's workshop operated under his patronage and every funeral called on him by name in its rites. None of that continued past antiquity. Egyptian temple religion as a functioning, continuously practiced system ended with the empire-wide closure of pagan sanctuaries under Christian rule in the late fourth century, and no institution has carried an unbroken line of Anubis worship from that closure to the present. The atlas records his veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult for exactly this reason: the record of real, sustained devotion at Cynopolis and elsewhere is solid, and the honest fact alongside it is that nothing links that ancient devotion to any living practice today.