Image Details

©Archivo Iconographico, S.A./Corbis

A god’s tent. Just as the Tabernacle was a shrine for the Israelite God, the ritual tents of the Egyptians served as shrines for their gods. Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of mummification and embalming, is frequently pictured performing funerary rites within the Tent of Purification, a simple wooden structure covered with a brightly colored cloth. Here Anubis bends over the mummy of Sennedjen, an Egyptian craftsman who helped construct the pharaonic pyramids in the Valley of the Kings, in Thebes. The painting, found on the wall of Sennedjen’s tomb in the worker’s village of Deir el-Medina, dates to the beginning of the 19th Dynasty (13th–12th centuries B.C.), around the time of Ramesses II, who is often identified as the pharaoh of the Exodus.