Anubis Before Osiris: Egypt's Original Lord of the Dead

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.