A 3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Dog Named for the Underworld
Three dogs sit under their master’s chair in a 3,500-year-old Egyptian tomb. For decades, only two of them had names on record. A faint line of paint above the third dog’s head had gone unnoticed.
The tomb is TT 21, the Theban tomb of User, a scribe and steward of Pharaoh Thutmose I, at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. Its inner chamber has four offering scenes. At least three show a dog under User’s chair, and the fourth is damaged, so a dog there is uncertain. All three surviving dogs wear collars and sit upright. They share the form of a sloughi, a thin New Kingdom dog with long legs, drooping ears and a curved tail.
Two names known, one hidden
Earlier work on the tomb recorded names for only two of the dogs. One name means “Strong one” and the other means “Trusty.” A closer look at the third scene found a faint name above the third dog’s head. The name became much clearer after the researcher processed the image with filters using the DStretch plug-in in ImageJ, which showed writing behind the dog’s head despite the faded original paint.
The name from the underworld
The name reads dwȝ.ty. Linguistically it is a derived adjective expressing origin, and the researcher translates it as “He-of-the-Underworld,” an epithet associated with Anubis, the Egyptian god linked with the dead. The researcher argues the name likely refers to Anubis. No other known Egyptian dog bears this name. A related form appears at least once as a human name, but dwȝ.ty had not been recorded as a dog name before.
The dog’s picture is also distinctive. It is a white, collared dog with a red rippled coat pattern that echoes User’s clothing. The written sign next to the name shows a seated dog that closely matches the animal’s posture under the chair, while most dog names use a standing dog sign. Only one other seated dog sign is known among Egyptian dog names. The artist clearly treated this dog differently from the other two, though the reason for the seated sign is less clear.
Why dogs got names
Nearly 100 dog names from ancient Egypt are now known, spanning the Old Kingdom through the Ptolemaic Period. Many refer to a dog’s appearance or behavior, and more than half come from private tombs. Egyptians saw tomb images as part of preparing for the afterlife, and names helped preserve the identity of the person or animal shown. A named dog therefore had a lasting place in the tomb owner’s connection to his world.
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