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:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)