Tutankhamun’s tomb contained a famous shrine depicting Anubis as a recumbent canine. The shrine was found in the annex of KV62, the pharaoh’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
The Anubis figure lies on a rectangular shrine and faces the entrance. Its carefully crafted form helped guard the funerary equipment and symbolically protect the burial. The figure is painted black, a color strongly associated in Egyptian funerary symbolism with regeneration, the fertile Nile soil, and the mummified body.
Tutankhamun ruled during Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty and died as a young king around the fourteenth century BCE. Howard Carter discovered the largely intact tomb in 1922. The shrine is one of the burial’s best-known objects, alongside the gold mask and the nested coffins.