Dogs in Pharaonic Egypt: Named Pets, Hunting Hounds and Anubis

Dogs walk through almost the whole of Egyptian history. They appear on painted pottery before the first pharaohs, run beside hunters in tomb reliefs, sit under their owners’ chairs on stelae and tomb walls, and fill underground galleries at Saqqara by the million. A handful of them have names that survive. One was buried at a king’s command, with a coffin from the royal treasury, fine linen and incense.

The evidence is uneven, and it pulls in two directions. Some of it shows dogs as individual animals that people valued and mourned. Some of it shows dogs as offerings on an industrial scale, many of them puppies apparently bred for the purpose and dedicated to a god. Both are part of the record, and neither cancels the other.

Hunters, herders and two words for “dog”

The oldest clear picture of the partnership is on a painted bowl of the Naqada I period (about 3900 to 3650 BCE), now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. It shows a man with a bow and arrows holding four dogs on leashes. Jennifer Houser Wegner, a curator in the Egyptian Section at the Penn Museum, points out that tomb hunting scenes of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, and objects of the New Kingdom, keep showing dogs with royal and non-royal hunters alike. The dogs may also have helped shepherds, guarded houses and kept people company.¹

Egyptian artists drew more than one kind of dog. Wegner describes sighthounds that look like modern greyhounds or salukis, and smaller, stockier dogs often shown with tightly curled tails. The language had two common words for the animal, transliterated tsm and iw.¹ A facsimile in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of a painting in the Theban tomb of Rekhmire, dated from the reign of Thutmose III to early in that of Amenhotep II, is titled “Hounds from Nubia.”²

Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo sums up the practical roles in three words: guards, hunting aids and companions. She adds a fourth, religious role, since dogs were closely linked with the gods Anubis and Wepwawet, deities of travel through the desert and between this world and the next.³

Nefer, Hebeny and “Useless”: what Egyptians called their dogs

Scenes on stelae and tomb walls often label the dogs that stand beside their owners, and Wegner counts more than seventy personal names for dogs. Some describe looks: Nefer, “Beautiful,” and Hebeny, “Ebony.” Some describe a job, such as Meniupu, which means “He is a shepherd.” Others seem to comment on character or health, like Seneb, “Healthy,” and one unlucky animal called Adjawetet, which means something like “Useless.”¹ The Egyptologist Henry G. Fischer devoted a 1977 article in the Metropolitan Museum Journal to such names.⁴

Dogs appear beside their owners from the royal court downward. A fragmentary stela of King Intef Wahankh II shows three of his dogs standing in front of him.¹ For the New Kingdom, facsimiles of Theban tomb paintings in the Met include one titled “Dog Named Ebony Under Owner’s Chair,” from the tomb of Duaerneheh, dated to the joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, and another showing a dog seated beneath its owner’s chair in the tomb of a man named Nebamun.⁵ Wegner takes scenes like these, in which dogs are shown with their owners, as evidence that Egyptians kept dogs as pets or household animals.¹

Not every canine object was so serious. Among the Met’s Egyptian holdings is a small painted ivory “Mechanical Dog,” about 18 centimeters long, from the reign of Amenhotep III.⁶ Wegner also notes the board game now called Hounds and Jackals, illustrated by a Middle Kingdom gameboard, in which one player used five dog-headed pieces and the other five jackal-headed ones.¹

Abutiyu, the dog a king buried

Perhaps the best-known Egyptian dog is known from a single inscribed limestone relief found near the Great Pyramid at Giza in 1935 and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (JE 67573). The dog’s name appears in English as Abutiyu or Abutiu, among other spellings.¹ Wegner quotes the text in a translation based on that of George Reisner, who published the find in 1936:

“The dog which was the guard of His Majesty. Abutiyu is his name. His Majesty ordered that he be buried (ceremonially), that he be given a coffin from the royal treasury, fine linen in great quantity, (and) incense. His Majesty (also) gave perfumed ointment, and (ordered) that a tomb be built for him by the gangs of masons. His Majesty did this for him in order that he (the dog) might be honored (before the great god, Anubis).”¹

The inscription reads like a summary of a proper human burial: coffin, linen, incense, ointment, a tomb built by work gangs. The words in parentheses are supplied by the translator, so the explicit mention of Anubis rests on the translator’s reading. What is clear is that a king chose to spend royal resources on a dog described as his guard, and that someone thought this worth recording in stone.

Dogs in the tomb

Abutiyu was not alone. Ikram notes that dogs were among the first animals Egyptians buried with care, and that the kings of the First Dynasty had their dogs buried near them at Abydos, each grave marked with its own stela.³ Pet burials usually sit inside a human tomb: in the owner’s coffin, in a coffin of their own, or in a nearby chamber.³

Several examples are well documented. At Beni Hasan, the archaeologist John Garstang found a small inscribed wooden coffin of the Middle Kingdom made for a dog named Heb, with canine remains still inside.¹⁷ At Abydos in 1902, Flinders Petrie excavated the tomb of a priest named Hapimen and found a carefully wrapped young dog buried with him. Ikram, who places the dog in the same coffin as its master, wonders whether it died of grief after him, while Wegner reads it simply as a wish to keep the animal close in the afterlife.³¹ A very well preserved dog from tomb 50 in the Valley of the Kings, now catalogued in Cairo as CG 29836, may have belonged to a nearby Eighteenth Dynasty king, Amenhotep II or Horemheb, and may have been a favored hunting hound, though Ikram presents that as a possibility rather than a certainty.³

Egyptian storytellers knew this attachment. In the New Kingdom tale known as The Doomed Prince, the Hathors come to decree the destiny of a newborn royal son and declare: “His death is to be by the crocodile, or by the serpent, or by the dog.” The king shuts the boy away in a desert house, but when the child sees a dog following a man along a road, he asks for one, and the king relents: “Let there be brought to him a little pet dog, lest his heart be sad.” Years later, when his wife urges him to kill the dog, the prince refuses: “I am not going to kill my dog, which I have brought up from when it was small.” The surviving papyrus ends with the dog leading him into a river where a crocodile waits, so no one knows whether the dog was to be his doom.⁸¹

Eight million for Anubis

Egypt had no god in the form of an ordinary domestic dog. Wegner stresses that the canine gods (Anubis, Wepwawet, Khenty-amentiu and Duamutef) are traditionally described as jackals, and that some scholars doubt the animal is a jackal at all, suggesting it may combine traits of several wild canids.¹ Living dogs, however, became offerings to those gods on an enormous scale.

Ikram describes Anubis as having a particularly large and active cult in the Late and Graeco-Roman periods. Pilgrims offered votive gifts to the god, and a mummified dog was thought to carry the donor’s prayers and requests to the god for eternity.³¹ Ikram lists canine cemeteries at about twenty sites, from Saqqara and Abydos to the Kharga Oasis, and dates most votive dog mummies from the sixth century BCE to probably the fourth century CE. The animals seem to have been kept at temples until festivals, when they were interred together.³ The Met holds one such wrapped mummy, catalogued as containing dog bones and dated about 400 BCE to 100 CE, from el-Deir in the Kharga Oasis.⁹

The largest known deposit lies at Saqqara. In 2009 a Cardiff University mission directed by Paul Nicholson, with Ikram as its animal bone specialist, began work on the so-called Dog Catacombs there, one of which formed the underground part of a temple of Anubis.¹⁰ Wegner notes that the researchers have studied two sizeable catacombs dedicated to Anubis, in use over hundreds of years.¹ The main catacomb runs about 173 meters along its central passage and up to 140 meters across its branch corridors, and the excavators estimate that it once held nearly 8,000,000 animals, about 92 percent of them dogs.¹¹³ Even spread over several centuries, that implies thousands of dedications a year. The full scientific report appeared in Antiquity in 2015.¹²

Many of the animals were very young. Nicholson told reporters that many of the dogs were only hours or days old when they were mummified, and that the puppies were probably bred, or as he put it farmed, for the cult.¹¹ Some older dogs had more elaborate burials and may have lived at the temple.¹¹ Nicholson had earlier suggested that dogs buried in special niches in the tunnel walls, apart from the great mass of remains, may have been such animals, kept as representatives of the god.¹⁰

Did the tesem become the basenji?

Modern dog writing often links Egyptian dogs to living breeds. The curl-tailed dogs in tomb paintings are compared to the basenji, and the sighthounds to the saluki or the Pharaoh Hound. Genetics makes such links hard to defend. A 2012 study led by Greger Larson concluded that closed-bloodline breeding began only in the nineteenth century and that “claims for the antiquity (and long-term continuity) of modern breeds are based upon little or no historical or empirical evidence.” The authors note that old depictions only “superficially suggest temporally deep origins” for breeds including the Pharaoh and Ibizan Hounds, neither of which shows a deep genetic signature.¹³

The basenji does come out as genetically distinctive, but Larson and colleagues attribute that to isolation and to small founding populations, including European stock begun from a handful of dogs collected in 1936 and supplemented with dogs from central Africa in 1988. They argue that genetic distinctiveness alone “cannot be used as a proxy to signify an ancient heritage.”¹³ Ancient Egyptian dogs resembled several modern types, but no living breed can be shown to descend in an unbroken line from the dogs on the tomb walls.

What does survive is the record of the relationship itself: hunters with leashed hounds, a pet called Ebony under a chair, a king’s guard dog given a coffin and linen, a fictional prince who would not give up his dog, and millions of dogs, many of them puppies, offered to a god.

Footnotes

1. Houser Wegner 2023, Glencairn Museum News. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴

2. Met 30.4.82 (catalogue record). ↩

3. Ikram 2013, Anthropozoologica 48(2), pp. 300-303. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. Fischer 1977, Metropolitan Museum Journal 12 (Crossref record). ↩

5. Met 39.4.1 and 30.4.100 (catalogue records). ↩

6. Met 40.2.1 (catalogue record). ↩

7. Tooley 1988, JEA 74 (Crossref record). ↩

8. “The Doomed Prince,” in Egyptian Literature (1901), pp. 137-140 (Wikisource). ↩

9. Met 13.182.50 (catalogue record). ↩

10. Nicholson 2010, Archaeology 63(5). ↩ ↩²

11. Geggel 2015, Live Science report as condensed by NBC News. ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. Nicholson, Ikram and Mills 2015, Antiquity 89 (Crossref record). ↩

13. Larson et al. 2012, PNAS 109(23). ↩ ↩²