Anubis was the jackal-god, the lord of the embalming-shop and of the necropolis. He was depicted either as a man with the head of a jackal (or a black canine that may be a stylized jackal-and-dog hybrid) or, less often, as a wholly canine animal couchant upon a shrine. His skin or pelage was painted black — not the natural tawny color of the jackal, but the black of bitumen, of the resin of embalming, and of the rich silt of the inundation — for blackness in Egyptian symbolism was the color of resurrection, of the fertile soil, of the dead made anew.

His office was twofold. He was the embalmer-god, who in mythic time had performed the original embalming of Osiris's recovered body, and whose priests, working in the embalming-shops of every Egyptian town, wore Anubis-masks during the seventy-day rite by which the dead were prepared for burial. He was also the psychopomp, the conductor of souls — it was Anubis who took the hand of the dead at the threshold of the next world and led them into the Hall of Two Truths, before the great scale and the throne of Osiris.

His name in Egyptian was Anpu; the Greek Anubis is a transcription. He was, in the deepest stratum of Egyptian religion, the god of the dead, the lord of the necropolis, the principal funerary deity. As the Osirian cult rose in the Old Kingdom and beyond, Anubis was progressively subordinated to Osiris, and his role was redefined as that of Osiris's faithful servitor and the operative of the embalming and judgment processes; but Anubis is much older than Osiris in the sphere of the dead, and his image and his cult sit at a deeper layer of Egyptian religion than the Osirian narrative that incorporates them.