Pharaohs and their dogs: the royal hounds of ancient Egypt

This page is about the real dogs of the Egyptian kings and their courts. It covers the guard dog a king buried at Giza, the pharaohs shown with their hounds, the names Egyptians gave their dogs, how dogs were buried, and the catacombs at Saqqara that held millions of dog mummies. The last part looks at which modern breeds kennel clubs link to Egypt, and what a genetic study says about those links. For royal animals in other times and places, start at the royal pets in history guide.

Abuwtiyuw, the guard dog a king buried

In 1935, the Harvard and Boston expedition led by the archaeologist George A. Reisner was working in the great cemetery west of the Pyramid of Cheops at Giza. In a small tomb numbered G 2188, the team found that one of the stones lining a burial chamber had been taken from an older chapel and reused. The Giza Project at Harvard University lists the block in the Cairo Museum under the number JE 67573.

Reisner published the find in the Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in December 1936. The block, of white limestone, measured 54.2 cm long, 28.2 cm high and 23.2 cm thick, with ten vertical lines of text. His translation reads:

"The dog which was the guard of His Majesty. Abuwtiyuw is his name. His Majesty ordered that he be buried (ceremonially), that he be given a coffin from the royal treasury, fine linen in great quantity, (and) incense. His Majesty (also) gave perfumed ointment, and (ordered) that a tomb be built for him by the gangs of masons. His Majesty did this for him in order that he (the dog) might be honored (before the great god, Anubis)."

The text never names the king. Reisner dated the chapel the block came from to the 5th or 6th Dynasty. He thought the dog belonged to a man who served close to the king, perhaps as a gardener, huntsman or bodyguard, and that the dog became the king's favourite. That part is Reisner's own reading of the evidence. He also wrote that his expedition had found no dog burial, and certainly none in a wooden coffin, and that finding the dog's own small tomb seemed hopeless.

Kings shown with their dogs

Other kings appear with dogs as well. Jennifer Houser Wegner, a curator in the Egyptian Section of the Penn Museum, wrote about Egyptian dogs for Glencairn Museum in 2023. She writes that a fragmentary stela, a carved stone slab, of King Intef II Wahankh shows him with three of his dogs standing before him. A gold ostrich feather fan from the tomb of Tutankhamun shows a hunting dog with the king on an ostrich hunt. An ostracon, a broken piece of stone or pottery used for drawing or writing, found near the entrance of his tomb in 1920 shows a king spearing a lion while his hunting dog helps.

Dogs went to war too. Henry G. Fischer, curator in Egyptology at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote in 1977 about a battle scene in the temple of Ramesses II at Beit el-Wali, where a dog helps the king attack a Libyan enemy. The dog's name is written beside it: "Anath Is a Defender", after a goddess. Fischer adds that dogs were used in military operations in the Libyan Desert as early as the start of the Middle Kingdom.

Egyptian stories give royal dogs a place as well. Wegner retells the New Kingdom tale of the Doomed Prince. The king's only son was fated at birth to die by a crocodile, a snake or a dog, so the king kept him shut away. When the boy saw a dog from his window and asked for one, the king allowed him a puppy. Later the prince refused to have the dog killed, because he had raised it since it was small. One day the dog turned and spoke to him. The end of the papyrus is damaged, so no one knows how the story ends.

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus gave the Egyptian view of what dogs were for. In book I of his Library of History, he wrote that the dog was useful for the hunt and for protecting people. He also wrote that dogs led the procession at the Festival of Isis.

Names written beside the dogs

Egyptians named their dogs, and the names were often written beside them in tomb scenes. Wegner counts more than 70 known dog names. Some describe the dog's looks, such as Nefer, "Beautiful", and Hebeny, "Ebony". Meniupu means "He is a shepherd", which may describe the dog's work. Seneb means "Healthy". One dog was named Adjawetet, which means something like "Useless".

Fischer's 1977 list builds on Jozef Janssen's list from 1958 and his own from 1961. Fischer found that dogs generally shared the same names as people. His count shows 42 names from before the Middle Kingdom and 13 from the New Kingdom and later, and three of those later names mention a god or the king.

The collar in that table comes from the tomb of a huntsman. Reisner wrote that the tomb of Maiherpri, a huntsman of the 18th Dynasty buried at Thebes, held two dog collars. One was richly made, with gilded pictures of animals, and it gives the name of the female dog who wore it. Reisner thought the dogs themselves were not buried there, and that the collars show Maiherpri expected his hounds to be with him in the next world.

How Egyptians buried and mourned their dogs

Herodotus, writing in book 2 of his Histories, reported that when a dog died, everyone in the house shaved the head and the whole body. He also wrote that female dogs were buried by the people of each town in sacred coffins. Diodorus recorded the same shaving of the whole body when a dog was found dead in a house.

Some dog burials survive. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge holds a small wooden coffin, believed to be for a dog, found by John Garstang at Beni Hasan and given to the museum in 1902. It was made from 12 pieces of Lebanese cedar, of which 8 survive, and measures 70 cm long, 21 cm high and 27 cm wide. It is painted yellow, and a band of hieroglyphs around it gives the owner's name as Heb. Wegner adds that the remains of a dog were found inside. She also writes that in 1902 Flinders Petrie excavated the tomb of a priest named Hapimen at Abydos and found a finely wrapped young dog placed beside him.

The dog catacombs of Saqqara

Two underground catacombs at Saqqara held dog burials of another sort. Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo and Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University described them in the Penn Museum's Expedition magazine in 2018. The two catacombs lie side by side on the east of the Saqqara plateau and were dedicated to Anubis, the god who oversaw embalming and protected travellers.

The authors estimate that the catacombs may once have held up to 8,000,000 animals. Over 400 to 500 years of use, that means thousands of dogs were given each year. Most were young, often newborn puppies only days or weeks old. Ikram and Nicholson think the smaller catacomb is the older one, and the larger one may date from the 5th or 4th century BC, when animal cults were growing. A temple to Anubis at Saqqara held dogs, but they think it is unlikely to have been the main breeding centre, and that puppy farms around Memphis supplied most of the animals. These dogs were gifts from pilgrims, who hoped the god would bring them good fortune in return.

Wegner writes that Anubis usually appears as a black jackal, or as a man with a jackal's head, and that the Egyptian gods with canine forms were jackal gods.

What Egyptian dogs looked like

At Hierakonpolis, a cemetery for the leading families from around 3700 to 3600 BC held dogs among its animal graves, and some were buried together with people, according to a 2014 paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Wegner describes an even older painted bowl, from 3900 to 3650 BC, showing a man with a bow holding four dogs on leashes.

Wegner writes that Egyptian artists showed several kinds of dog, including sighthounds, fast dogs that hunt by sight, which look like modern greyhounds or salukis, and smaller, stockier dogs with tightly curled tails. The two common words for dog were tsm and iw. Reisner linked tsm to the greyhound type and wrote that Abuwtiyuw was one. He added that the hound is usually shown with its tail curling upward, and that in Old Kingdom hunting scenes these hounds are held on a leash or pull down wild animals.

Modern breeds linked to Egypt

Three modern breeds come up when Egyptian dogs are compared with today's dogs. The Royal Kennel Club links the Pharaoh Hound and the Basenji to Egyptian tombs, and both Wegner and Reisner compare Egyptian sighthounds with the Saluki. A genetic study from 2004 checks part of those claims.

The Royal Kennel Club says the Pharaoh Hound can be seen on ancient Egyptian tombs, and in the same entry that the breed was native to Malta. It says Phoenician sailors are thought to have taken such dogs to Egypt, which gave the breed its name. For the Basenji, the club points to tomb paintings that look like the breed.

The genetic study was published in Science in 2004. The National Human Genome Research Institute, which answered readers' questions about it, says it sorted 85 breeds into four main groups. An ancient group of breeds, closest to the grey wolf, included the Saluki and the Afghan Hound. The Pharaoh Hound and the Ibizan Hound were outside that group. The researchers answer that these breeds may be modern re-creations of old breeds, or that mixing with other breeds over thousands of years may have hidden an old line. On whether the Pharaoh Hound keeps an unbroken line to ancient Egypt, they answer that they truly do not know.

A royal portrait for your own hound

The cover of this page shows a dog in the Maharani style, one of the 15 royal portrait styles on this site. For the cats of the same courts, read cats in ancient Egypt. The hunting dogs of India's rulers are covered in Indian royal dog breeds. Finished portraits are in the gallery, and the portrait studio takes one clear photo of up to 5 MB, for a digital download or an art print.