Anubis, also called Anpu, is an ancient Egyptian god of the dead, represented by a jackal or a figure of a man with the head of a jackal. In the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom, he held a preeminent (though not exclusive) position as the lord of the dead, but he was later overshadowed by Osiris. His role is reflected in such epithets as “He Who Is upon His Mountain” (i.e., the necropolis), “Lord of the Sacred Land,” “Foremost of the Westerners,” and “He Who Is in the Place of Embalming.”
Anubis’s particular concern was with the funerary cult and the care of the dead. He was reputed to be the inventor of embalming, an art he first employed on the corpse of Osiris. In his later role as the “conductor of souls,” he was sometimes identified by the Greco-Roman world with the Greek Hermes in the composite deity Hermanubis.
Inside Nesykhonsu’s coffin, there are two jackals, one facing right and the other left, near the top. Here, the jackal represents the powerful deity Anubis, the god of the afterlife and embalming.
