The Egyptians loved dogs and treated them in ways which recall immediately the most besotted dog lover raised dogs to the level of divinity, as they did other animals. Of the canine divinities Anubis is perhaps the oldest, certainly the most celebrated. But he was not the only one nor, originally perhaps, the most important.
Osiris, who became so influential in later Old Kingdom times and onward, in fact succeeded to the place and worship of an ancient canine divinity of Abydos, an Upper Egyptian god of the dead, Khentiamentiu. The most important of the primeval canine dogs was without doubt Wep-wawet, a god of graveyards who was particularly identified with the person of the king. Wepwawet was the ‘Opener of the Ways’; he was the Egyptian psychopompos. He was one of the protagonists of the early dynasts in his role of ‘guide of the gods’: he was portrayed, like Khentiamentiu, as a dog couchant. Although in later times he was somewhat eclipsed by Anubis, in the early periods he was very powerful. Wepwawet was especially identified with king, in life and in death. He was the king’s guide and he led the procession of the divinities of Egypt when they attended the king on the great occasions of state.
Wepwawet was described by the Greeks as a wolf but the wolf is not indigenous to Egypt. However, in some ancient rituals, long before the
Greeks existed Wepwawet is associated in the state processions of which he is the leader with officers who wore wolf-pelts and this suggests that there may have been some remote, wolfish connotation.33 It may be that the cult of Wepwawet was brought into Egypt in very early times by settlers from a region where wolves were known and, seeing the jackal, a familiar sight near all human habitations in Egypt as elsewhere, mistook the jackal for the wolf.
The handsome, slender hunting dog, with prick-ears, a long muzzle, and a tail which curls round over its back, is familiar from many Old Kingdom contexts in particular; the word used to describe it tjesm probably simply means ‘hound’. Often it is shown sitting beneath its owner’s chair, alert and watchful or at the chase; often like its master, it is named. This elegant hound has a claim not only to be recognized as the superb Anubis but also as the more equivocal animal of Set. The hunting dog was possibly a cross between the gentle eyed wandering desert dogs and the small Egyptian jackals. The Egyptians represented the jackal quite distinctively, emphasizing its thick bushy tail and rounded ears.
The actual descent of the hunting hound, the dog called tjesm by the Egyptians, is complex, its history beyond the scope of this present work. Whilst most zoological opinion believes that all domesticated dogs are descended from tamed wolves, some commentators have suggested that at some time, early on in the settlement of the Valley or even before it, the tjesm may have had an infusion of Golden Jackal genes in its ancestry. The probability is that the Egyptians themselves were not over-concerned with the distinction between the various species of canid, but merely celebrated their nature in all canine forms.
World History
