Statue of the God Anubis - I

Anubis is among the most ancient and important deities of the Egyptian pantheon: he presided over mummification and burial rites and was the Lord of the Necropolis. He was represented, in Egyptian iconography, as a jackal or as a man with the head of a jackal.

This statue offers eloquent testimony to a syncretic divine figure, Anubis, who in the Roman context was assimilated to Mercury: the god with its jackal’s head, with a small solar disc on a crescent moon between its ears, wears a short tunic, a cloak and shoes, and holds the caduceus in his hand, in his function as the ferryman of the dead to the Underworld (“psychopomp”).

The statue, discovered in Anzio on land belonging to the Pamphilj family in 1749, was donated to Pope Benedict XIV and was transferred to the Gregorian Egyptian Museum in 1839.

 

Source: Museum WEB Site

 

Parian marble sculpture

F. 155 cm.; W. 50 cm.; D. 28 cm.

Late 1st - early 2nd century AD

From Azio, Villa Pamphilj

Vatican City State, Vatican Museums, Museo Gregoriano Egizio, inv. no. 22840.

 

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