Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Gods and Goddesses

Anubis and the Weighing of the Heart

Anubis, the jackal god of embalming, and the famous 'Weighing of the Heart' ceremony, how the Egyptians judged the dead and what happened to those who failed.

Anubis and the Weighing of the Heart

The most dramatic moment in the Egyptian afterlife was the Weighing of the Heart, in which the heart of the deceased was placed on a great scale and weighed against the feather of Ma’at, the goddess of truth. The ritual took place in the Hall of Two Truths, in the depths of the underworld, before Osiris and a tribunal of forty-two divine judges. It was the moment at which a soul was either justified or destroyed.

This page explains the ceremony, the god who performed it, and what happened to the souls who passed, or failed, the test. For the broader context, see the cluster page on Osiris and the Gods of the Afterlife.

Anubis: The Jackal-Headed God of the Dead

Anubis (Inpu, Anpu) was the god of mummification and of the dead. He was usually shown as a man with the head of a black jackal, or as a fully black jackal lying on a shrine. The color black was chosen for its association with fertility and rebirth, after the black silt of the Nile, and for the dark, fertile color of a corpse after embalming.

Anubis had several roles in Egyptian religion:

  • He invented mummification when he embalmed the body of Osiris for the first time, after Set had cut it into pieces. See the full story in The Myth of Osiris, Isis, and Set.
  • He supervised the embalmers at the mummification workshop, often called the Per-Nefer (“Beautiful House”) or the wabet. See our guide to the mummification process and to the embalmers’ preparation.
  • The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was performed at the tomb, in which the heir (or a priest impersonating the heir) touched the mummy’s mouth with a special adze, re-enacting Horus’s act for Osiris, to restore the senses to the deceased.
  • He led the souls of the dead from the tomb to the Hall of Two Truths.
  • He weighed the heart of the deceased against the feather of Ma’at.

The Hall of Two Truths

The Hall of Two Truths (in Egyptian, Maa-her-aa or Maa-t-cheri) was the great courtroom in the depths of the underworld. Here, Osiris sat on his throne as the chief judge, surrounded by forty-two assessor gods, one for each of the major sins of the soul. These assessors were local gods from the nomes of Egypt, each presiding over a particular sin.

When the deceased arrived, Anubis led them to the hall. They then had to make a Negative Confession, a long statement in which they denied each of the forty-two sins. The famous lines from the Book of the Dead are among the earliest moral statements in human history. The deceased would say things like:

  • “I have not done wrong.”
  • “I have not stolen.”
  • “I have not killed.”
  • “I have not told lies.”
  • “I have not eaten my heart” (meaning, I have not allowed grief or anxiety to consume me).

Once the confession was complete, the heart was placed on the scale.

The Scales of Ma’at

The scales of Ma’at were a pair of great balances, often shown in Egyptian art. On one side sat the heart of the deceased. The goddess Ma’at herself, in the form of her feather, was placed on the pan; in the standard iconography of Spell 125, Anubis and Thoth are shown operating the scales.

The Egyptians believed that the heart (ib) was the seat of the soul, the intelligence, and the moral character. The brain was considered unimportant, and was discarded in mummification; the heart, by contrast, was the only organ left inside the body (or, in some cases, returned to the chest cavity after being preserved separately).

Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing, stood ready to record the verdict. The dead who passed the weighing were called maa-kheru, “true of voice”, and were admitted to the Field of Reeds, the eternal mirror of Egypt. The dead who failed faced a much worse fate.

Ammit: The Devourer of the Dead

If the heart was heavier than the feather, that is, if it was weighed down by sin, the heart was fed to Ammit (also Ahemait, “the Devourer”), a monstrous creature that combined the head of a crocodile, the forequarters of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus. Ammit stood beside the scales, and when a soul failed, the heart was given to her. The soul, in Egyptian belief, was then destroyed forever.

The image of Ammit was meant to terrify the dead into confessing honestly. The Egyptians believed that the heart might try to lie or hide its sins during the confession, and a number of spells in the Book of the Dead are designed to prevent the heart from testifying against its owner.

The Heart Scarab, a scarab amulet placed on the mummy’s chest, often carried the spell from Chapter 30B of the Book of the Dead:

“O my heart, do not stand as a witness against me, do not oppose me in the tribunal, do not be hostile to me in the presence of the keeper of the balance.”

The scarab, associated with Khepri and the rising sun, was believed to be a self-created being with the power to renew the heart in the next world.

The Forty-Two Assessor Gods

The forty-two assessor gods of the Hall of Two Truths are listed in the 125th Spell of the Book of the Dead. Their names vary slightly between copies of the spell, and I think that variation is theologically interesting rather than scribal error. The orthodox position is that the assessor list is canonical and the variations are accidents of transmission. The position I find more convincing, following the recent work of the Belgian Egyptologist Jean Winand and the older observations of Gustave Lefebvre, is that the list is canonical in number (forty-two) but variable in attribution: the Egyptians cared about the total count and the moral categories more than they did about which specific god presided over which specific sin. A scribe commissioning a papyrus was free to swap assessor names around, particularly in provincial copies, as long as the count was right. The principle is consistent even when the names are not.

The deceased addressed each in turn, denying a specific sin, from “I have not killed” to “I have not caused tears” to “I have not been a cause of grief.” The negative confession is the central moral document of the Egyptian afterlife.

The Verdict and the Afterlife

If the heart was lighter than the feather, meaning that the deceased was free of sin, the verdict was announced. The deceased was maa-kheru (“true of voice”), and was admitted to the afterlife.

Once admitted, the deceased:

  • Was presented to Osiris, who welcomed them into the kingdom of the dead
  • Was given a ushabti figure, a small servant statue that would do labor on their behalf in the next world
  • Was led to the Field of Reeds, an eternal version of Egypt where the crops grew tall and the dead rejoined their families

The Field of Reeds is described in detail in the Book of the Dead and in the Shabaka Stone. It was a place of abundance, where the deceased could hunt, fish, and farm without effort, and where the gods themselves were present. For more on the Egyptian afterlife, see the cluster page on Mummies and the Afterlife and the guide to the Journey of the Soul.

Anubis Beyond the Hall

Anubis was not only a judge of the dead. He was a protector of tombs, a guardian of cemeteries, and the patron of embalmers. His image appears in:

  • The wall paintings of the Tombs of the Nobles
  • The canopic chests of the pharaohs
  • The mummy boards of the New Kingdom
  • The small shrines that stood outside the tombs

The Anubis shrine at Deir el-Bahari, near the Temple of Hatshepsut, is one of the most famous shrines to Anubis. The hidden tomb of the Valley of the Kings, the burial place of Tutankhamun and others, was guarded in myth by Anubis.

The Cult of Anubis in Historical Time

The cult of Anubis was already ancient by the time the first Egyptian dynasty arose. His name appears in the royal names of the First Dynasty, and his image is found in tombs from the Old Kingdom onward. In the Middle Kingdom, he was the patron of the Per-Nefer, the mummification workshop, and a chapter of the Coffin Texts is dedicated to him.

In the Late Period, Anubis was absorbed into the cult of Osiris, and his image was often combined with that of Hermanubis, a hybrid god of the Greek and Roman world. To see how Egyptian gods spread to Greece and Rome, see the Persian and Greek Influence page.

Anubis in Modern Times

The image of Anubis, the black jackal, the silent attendant at the scales, has become one of the most recognizable images of ancient Egypt in modern popular culture. The Weighing of the Heart scene from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer is reproduced in countless books and documentaries, and the figure of Anubis is the most common image of the Egyptian gods in cinema, fiction, and games.

But to the Egyptians, Anubis was not a creature of horror. He was a protector, a guide, and a friend. He walked the souls of the dead through the dangers of the underworld, and he was the one who ensured that the proper rituals were observed at every stage. As Emily Teeter has written (Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, 2011, pp. 109-130), Anubis was the most frequently invoked divine figure in the magical papyri of the Late Period, a sign of how central his protection remained in Egyptian piety.