Why Does Anubis Have a Jackal's Head?: Egyptian Gods for Kids, and the Real Clues That Tell You How to Read an Animal Head

A jackal's head on a man's shoulders is not a picture of a thing that walked about. Nobody in Egypt met a god with the head of an animal. The picture was never meant to be a portrait, and once you know that, the question stops being why it looks so strange and starts being what it is telling you.This book does not tell you about Egyptian gods. It puts real museum objects in front of you, described piece by piece, and you read them.You start with the rule: the head is doing a job, and the name is the thing a museum can actually read. Then you take the animal heads one at a time, a jackal, a falcon, an ibis, a lion and a cat, a crocodile. You find out what a colour is for, why one god can turn up as two different animals, and what to do when nobody can even say what the animal is.By the last chapter you are handed a god the book has never shown you and asked to work him out on your own. The picture gives you his job. His name comes from a museum's own list, which is where names come from, and the chapter shows you how it was worked out.Inside this book- Seventeen chapters that take you from looking at a god to reading one- Four parts: The Rule, The Animal Heads, Gods Without Animal Heads, and Reading Real Things- The god list at the back, with the head, the thing on the head, the colour and the job for all seventeen gods, and the unknown cells left empty on purpose- A plain explanation of how we know who is who- A word list with one key term from every chapter- A small icon at the head of every chapterWritten for readers aged 8 to 12.