Guide of the Dead, and Keeper of the Scales

Anubis's second great role is to conduct the dead through the dangers of the afterlife and to oversee their judgement. In the Book of the Dead it is Anubis who leads the deceased into the hall of judgement and who adjusts the balance on which the heart is weighed against the feather of Maat, checking the scales so that the verdict is true. He does not pass the sentence, that is Osiris's role, with Thoth recording, but he guarantees that the weighing itself is honest.

Egyptian religion changed over time, and Anubis's standing changed with it. In the earliest funerary texts, before Osiris rose to dominate the afterlife, Anubis was the pre-eminent god of the dead in his own right; as the Osiris religion spread, Anubis was folded into it as Osiris's loyal assistant and embalmer. This is a clear case of one god's myth being reorganised around another's, visible in the record rather than smoothed over.

In the Greco-Roman period he took on a further, hybrid life as Hermanubis, merged with the Greek Hermes as a guide of souls, a syncretism that carried the jackal-god into the wider Mediterranean.