Ancient Amulet Depicting Anubis
Late Period to Ptolemaic Period, Egypt
Faience
664 – 30 BCE

This amulet depicting Anubis, the jackal-headed deity associated with mummification and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion, would have been worn only by the dead. The black jackal’s chief activity was prowling around desert cemeteries seeking bones to crunch or skulking around embalmers’ storage rooms in the hope of carrying off a piece from an unsupervised corpse. Because the destruction of a body prevented an afterlife, Anubis was deified as the god of embalming, determined to protect the very object he would by nature attack. As such, he was also considered the guide to the afterlife. According to legend, he was the son of Osiris and Nephthys, and practiced his embalming skills for the very first time on his father’s corpse.

Faience is a glazed composition that consists of a sandy core (ideally but rarely of pure powdered quartz), with a glassy alkaline glaze on its surface; the glaze can be of any color depending on the colorant added to the mixture. The reason for the popularity of faience was its ability to be molded (usually in an open-backed pottery mold) or modelled into any amuletic shape (Andrews, Amulets of Ancient Egypt, 1994).  

2.7 in :: 6.8 cm

InventoryID #13-2678

Not For Sale