These flourishes not only provided the minimally counterintuitive properties necessary to make the gods more memorable; they allowed Egyptians to manage and, more important, manipulate the god’s symbolic function. Anubis was depicted as a jackal-headed man because the jackal is a scavenging animal known for occasionally digging up and devouring corpses buried in the desert. By depicting the protector of graves as a jackal in human form, the Egyptians sought to control what was a widely feared force of nature with the power to disrupt the funerary practices that were so vital to ancient
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