Wepwawet

The standard went first. Ahead of the king, ahead of the fan-bearers and the priests and the whole slow weight of a procession moving through heat and limestone dust, a lean black canid rode a pole above the crowd, and in front of its muzzle sat a bulbous, hooked shape that nobody now can name. Egypt carried that pole for three thousand years without ever writing down what the shape was.

Wepwawet is one of the oldest gods on the Egyptian record, and the record is not papyrus. It is stone and ivory. He appears on the Narmer macehead and the Narmer palette, on the Scorpion macehead, on inscribed seals from the reign of Djer, on an ivory label of Den now in the British Museum, in the jubilee panels cut beneath Djoser’s Step Pyramid, on the Palermo Stone, in reliefs from the mortuary temple of Sneferu and the sun temple of Niuserre and the pyramid complex of Pepi II. Before Egypt had a literature it had this animal on a stick, going in front of the king.

His name is a job description. The verb wpj means to open, to split, to cleave something apart; wꜣwt is roads. Opener of the Ways. The usual reading makes him a guide, a protective escort walking the dead through the underworld, and that reading is comfortable and probably incomplete, because opening is not the same as guiding. Opening means something was in the road and is not any more.

Which brings the argument back to the shape in front of his nose. It is called the shedshed, because the Pyramid Texts use an identically drawn sign to write that word, and the Middle Kingdom gave Wepwawet the title Lord of the Shedshed. Nobody knows what it is. It has been called a rolled feather, a bag of animal skin, a throne cushion, a mummy sledge, and, on the strength of a Gebelein relief where the shedshed and the royal afterbirth emblem are both stippled with the same small dots, the king’s own placenta. Traced chronologically it starts on the Narmer macehead as a thin hook extending the baseline under the animal’s feet, detaches, thickens, and by the mid-Fifth Dynasty has curled into a spiral doubling back on itself, always keeping the same two-part structure of a tube ending in a swelling.

Linda Evans, working from how Egyptian artists conventionally drew animal burrows and from what canids actually do, proposed in 2011 that the shedshed is a den. The linguistic evidence leans the same way. Every Old Kingdom word built on the root šd circles around emptiness: to hollow out, to dig, to take away, to suckle, a water hole, a well, a cistern, a bag, a tear. Doubling the root suggests either the act of making a space or the space itself. If that is right, the god’s name stops being about escort duty. He is the one who digs the obstruction out, and the emblem he faces is the hole he made.

It reorganises everything else about him. The king running the heb-sed course, marking out with his own legs the ground he claimed to rule, had Wepwawet carried ahead of him, defining the space in front. Wepwawet stands in the scenes where the pharaoh smashes his enemies, which is exactly the work of a scout: find the thing blocking the advance and remove it before the army arrives. He could be described, like Shu, as the one who separated sky from earth, except that Shu was the air itself and Wepwawet may have been the emptiness. The Pyramid Texts say the dead king ascends ḥr šdšd, translated for a century as “upon the shedshed” on the assumption it was a solid thing. Read it as a void and the preposition turns into “through”, and the king rises to the sky by passing through the gap between the two.

The animal itself refuses to be pinned down. Its head and muzzle belong to any canid, its body is greyhound-thin in a way no wild Egyptian species is, its ears are more fox than jackal, its tail is jackal-narrow and fox-long. It is best treated as a composite. Generations of writers have called him a wolf, which is almost certainly the fault of the Greeks, who renamed his cult city Lycopolis, Wolf City, and there is no evidence that a wolf has ever lived in Egypt. From the First Dynasty a rearing cobra joins the composition, planted between the animal and the shedshed, and after the Third Dynasty it becomes standard, usually growing straight out of the emblem’s base.

At Abydos, where he was called Lord of the Necropolis, he did something no summary of him quite prepares you for. In the Middle Kingdom mysteries of Osiris, when the god’s barque went out in procession and the crowd came to watch, it was Wepwawet and not Horus who fought as Osiris’s champion and cut down his enemies. The son’s role went to the jackal.

His own city was Asyut, and the best evidence for what he meant to people who were not kings came out of a single tomb there. The trove from the Salakhana tomb yielded votive stelae by the hundred, ordinary men buying a piece of stone and putting their names next to his. On one Nineteenth Dynasty limestone slab now in Cairo, a man called Ramose kneels before the jackal on his sledge-standard under a line of text naming him Wepwawet of Upper Egypt, the Controller of the Two Lands, while in the register below his companion Wepmose raises both hands to two jackals at once, Wepwawet of Upper Egypt and Wepwawet of Lower Egypt, with an offering table and a tangle of eels and fish beneath them.

What he cannot do is be the subject. He has no marriage, no death, no cycle of his own, no story where the camera stays on him; he is permanently the figure in the foreground of somebody else’s scene, and Terence DuQuesne suggested he may have begun as an aspect of another canine god, possibly Anubis, that broke off and set up on its own. If so, the split never fully took. Anubis absorbed the embalming, the scales, the whole visual identity of the Egyptian dog-god in the popular imagination, and Wepwawet was demoted to brother and then to a name people mistake for Anubis on sight. The god who spent three millennia opening the way for everyone else ended up standing in someone else’s shadow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Wepwawet?

Wepwawet is an ancient Egyptian god shown as a lean black canid standing on a standard, whose name means “Opener of the Ways”. He is one of the earliest deities in the Egyptian record, appearing on protodynastic objects such as the Narmer palette and the Scorpion macehead, and his cult centre was Asyut in Upper Egypt.

What is the strange object in front of Wepwawet on his standard?

It is called the shedshed, and it has never been identified conclusively. Suggestions have included a rolled feather, an animal-skin bag, a throne cushion, a mummy sledge and the king’s placenta. A 2011 study by Linda Evans argued it depicts a canid den, supported by the fact that Old Kingdom words built on the same root all refer to digging, hollowing and empty spaces.

Is Wepwawet a wolf or a jackal?

Neither, strictly. The figure combines features from several canids: a generic canid head, a body as slender as a greyhound, fox-like ears and a tail that is jackal-narrow but fox-long. The persistent “wolf” label comes from the Greeks renaming his city Lycopolis, or Wolf City, and no wolf is known to have lived in ancient Egypt.

What is the difference between Wepwawet and Anubis?

They are separate gods who came to be treated as brothers, and Terence DuQuesne suggested Wepwawet may have originally been an aspect of Anubis that split off. Anubis is the god of embalming and the weighing of the heart, while Wepwawet’s work is clearing the path ahead, in war, in royal ceremony and in the passage of the dead.

What role did Wepwawet play at Abydos?

He was titled Lord of the Necropolis there, and in the Middle Kingdom mysteries of Osiris he acted as Osiris’s champion, destroying his enemies in the role usually given to Horus. Votive stelae and offering stelae showing jackal deities also indicate he was called on for everyday protection by ordinary people.

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