Anubis is described in almost every source as jackal-headed. That description is probably wrong, and the correction is the most interesting thing about him.

Is Anubis a wolf?

The animal that inspired the image of Anubis was the Egyptian jackal, a canid found along the Nile and throughout north-east Africa. For well over a century it was classified as a subspecies of the golden jackal.

Genetic work overturned that. The Egyptian jackal turned out not to be a jackal at all but a member of the wolf lineage, and it was reclassified accordingly as the African golden wolf.

Which means the god who guides the dead through the Egyptian underworld has, on the best current evidence, the head of a wolf. Four thousand years of iconography, filed under the wrong animal.

Who Anubis was

Anubis is a canine-headed god of mummification and the afterlife. His function is that of a psychopomp: he does not judge the dead so much as escort them, guiding each soul from the moment of death to whatever comes next.

Anubis is the Greek rendering of the name. The Egyptians called him Inpu, also written Anpu or Ienpw, and it is that name that appears in the earliest sources.

Those sources are old. Anubis turns up in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, connected there with the burial of kings, which makes him one of the oldest continuously worshipped figures in the Egyptian pantheon.

He was originally the principal god of the dead. By the Middle Kingdom that position had passed to Osiris, and Anubis was reassigned rather than retired, keeping the specific and essential work of embalming.

Two of his titles capture the job precisely. He who is on his mountain describes the god looking down from the desert cliffs above the tombs, watching over them. He who is at the place of embalming needs no explanation.

His parentage, which is a scandal

Anubis is the son of Osiris and Nephthys, and the circumstances are not respectable.

Nephthys was married to Set and had long wanted Osiris, who was married to her twin sister Isis. She disguised herself as Isis, deceived Osiris, and conceived Anubis.

That single act sits underneath a great deal of later Egyptian mythology, since Set's eventual murder of Osiris is not unconnected to it.

Anubis is sometimes given a daughter, Kebechet, a serpent goddess associated with the purifying water used in embalming. Anput appears as his female counterpart, essentially a feminine form of the same deity.

What he actually did

Anubis held several roles at once, which was normal for Egyptian gods.

Lord of the necropolis

He guarded the burial grounds. The association is grimly practical: wild canids scavenged around cemeteries, so the animal seen most often among the tombs became the animal that guarded them.

He is shown either as a man with a canine head or as a full canine lying watchful, wearing a ribbon and holding a flail.

His colour is deliberate. Anubis is always black, and the black is not the colour of the living animal. It stands for the darkening of a body after death, for the black silt the Nile flood left across the fields, and therefore for rebirth. Decay and fertility carried in one colour.

Patron of embalmers

In the myth of Osiris, Anubis receives the dismembered god's organs and performs the first embalming. That episode makes him the patron of everyone who did the work afterwards.

Priests conducting a mummification wore canine masks, and the chief embalmer took the role of Anubis directly. The god was not merely invoked; somebody in the room was him.

Weigher of the heart

This is his most famous role and the one painted into the Book of the Dead.

In the hall of judgement, the heart of the dead was placed on one pan of a scale and a single feather belonging to Ma'at, goddess of truth, on the other. Anubis operated the scale.

A heart lighter than the feather meant a life lived rightly and passage to the afterlife. A heavy heart was fed to Ammit, and the soul ceased to exist entirely.

The Egyptian afterlife had no hell. It had annihilation, and Anubis held the balance that decided it.

Guardian of the underworld

In the older Ogdoad tradition Anubis was the ruler of the underworld outright rather than an officer within it, and traces of that seniority survive in how he is depicted long after Osiris took the title.

Anubis since

The figure keeps resurfacing. Tim Powers built The Anubis Gates around Egyptian magic, time travel and the Knights Templar, winning the 1983 Philip K. Dick Award for it, and lycanthropy runs through the plot, which brings the wolf question back round again.

If that thread interests you, our article on werewolves and lycanthropy covers the European version of humans wearing wolf shapes.

Wearing the guardian

Anubis works unusually well as jewelry because the profile is instantly recognisable and reads clean in metal.

Our wolf ring collection includes an Anubis design in steel.

For the mask rather than the ring, our wolf mask collection carries an Anubis piece alongside the Japanese and werewolf designs.