History
In very early Egyptian mythology, the deity Imiut (meaning, "He who is in his wrappings") may have been a god of the underworld, although insufficient records survive to explain whether this was the case. An early example found in 1914 by an expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art near the pyramid of Senusret I (c. 1971-1928 BCE) was placed in a shrine.
Since it was later connected to the god Anubis, it is sometimes called the Anubis fetish. One idea is that it came to symbolise Anubis as an embalmer, although this is unlikely to be the original understanding, as Anubis was originally a god of the dead, rather than just embalming. There are depictions of the imiut fetish on ancient Egyptian temples, and sometimes there were models of it included with the funerary equipment, most notably the two found in the burial chamber of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter.
Read more about this topic: Imiut Fetish
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)