Egypt Museum airs 1,000 years of jackal god gifts

CAIRO: A thousand years worth of offerings to an ancient Egyptian jackal god are the subject of an exhibition that opened on Thursday at Cairo s Egyptian Museum. The exhibition, Anubis, Upwawet and Other Deities , is based on votive offerings that British archaeologist Gerald Wainwright found in a tomb built around 1800 or 1900 BC near the southern town of Assiut. The tomb originally belonged to a local hereditary prince, but for more than 1,000 years local people used it as a shrine for personal devotion, filling it with tablets dedicated to the local jackal god Upwawet. The stelae (tablets) offer us unrivalled evidence about the social history of the region. Much may be gleaned from the names and occupations of the people (who dedicated them to Upwawet), the museum said in a statement. About 100 of the 400 stelae are made of terracotta, or baked clay, a material not used for stelae at other Egyptian sites. Many are relatively crude and most are covered with pictures of jackals and other dog-like animals. You learn from these about common people, their situations, their families and sometimes how they lived and why they are coming to devote this stela, said museum director Wafaa El-Saddik.