Anubis

The familiar version of Anubis's role has him assisting Isis and Nephthys at the embalming of Osiris's own body. That account, however, casts Anubis as a supporting figure in a story that centers on Osiris, and the earliest Egyptian religious texts tell a different history. The Pyramid Texts inscribed in the tomb of King Unas in the Fifth Dynasty, around 2400 BCE, already name Anubis jmy-wt, He Who Is In the Place of Embalming, and sentinel of the necropolis ridge, describing him as chief among the gods of the dead in his own right rather than as anyone's assistant. Titles later transferred to Osiris, including Khenty-Imentiu, Foremost of the Westerners, referring to the dead who dwell in the west, were originally Anubis's own. Only in the Middle Kingdom, as Osiris rose to become Egypt's central god of resurrection and the afterlife, did Anubis's office narrow to the embalmer's and psychopomp's role already recorded, while Osiris took over the wider lordship of the dead itself. The later myth did not displace an older one so much as reassign an older god's job description to a newer god, keeping Anubis close to the same work under a different chief.

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.