Anubis, Archer Figures, and Demotic Magic

In the recent exhibition catalog Death Dogs: The Jackal Gods of Ancient Egypt by Terry Wilfong, there appeared as number thirty-two a papyrus inscribed with a Demotic text accompanied by a rather interesting illustration. Wilfong mentions that the "text is, as yet, unedited, but the illustration — showing a jackal-headed god most likely to be Anubis shooting a bow and arrow toward a grotesque naked male figure — makes it all but certain that this papyrus is a magical text. A jackal-headed god shooting a bow and arrow is sometimes represented in amulet form (for example, see Andrews 1994, 47, fig. 52a), and this image may be related." The authors are currently working to edit and publish the papyrus in full. This preliminary publication will serve to confirm Wilfong's suspicions about the text, the jackal-headed figure, and to situate the illustration explicitly within the larger corpus of archer figures from ancient Egypt.