A Greek householder placed a bronze coin under his mother’s tongue and turned her face toward the west. Ten miles south of Memphis, an Egyptian embalmer fitted a jackal-headed mask and pressed his hand against a corpse’s chest. Both men were preparing the dead for a journey. Both believed a god was waiting. The question is which god — and what that god did once you arrived.
Anubis and Hades are underworld deities, but they governed fundamentally different territories: Anubis guided and judged the individual soul at the moment of death, while Hades ruled the collective realm of the dead as a king, rarely interacting with the shades who lived there. One was a psychopomp who weighed hearts; the other was a custodian who never left his throne.
Between the banks of the Nile and the slopes of Olympus, two civilizations built their maps of the afterlife around these figures. Comparing them reveals not just two gods, but two radically different ideas about what death is.
Where Do We Meet Each God in the Record?
The cult of Anubis predates the dynastic period. Anubis (Inpu in Egyptian) appears in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom (c. 2400 BCE), carved into the burial chambers of Unas and Teti. He is called “Lord of the Sacred Land” and “Foremost of the Westerners,” names that connect him to the necropolis and the underworld’s entrance. His earliest centers of worship were in Cynopolis (the city of dogs) and Asyut.
Hades emerges much later in the Greek record. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (c. 600 BCE) gives the earliest sustained portrayal: Hades abducts Persephone with Zeus’s permission and rules the underworld from a palace of bronze gates. His name itself — Hades (Haides, “the unseen one”) — reflects his cloak of invisibility. In the Iliad and Odyssey, he is called “Zeus of the underworld,” a counterpart to the sky god but no less powerful.
The Egyptian material is older by roughly eighteen centuries. Anubis was already ancient when Homer’s audiences heard the story of Persephone’s descent.
What Each God Actually Did
Anubis was not a king of the dead. He was a guide, a protector, and a judge. Egyptian funerary texts show him presiding over the Weighing of the Heart in the Hall of Two Truths, placing the deceased’s heart on a scale against the feather of Ma’at (truth and cosmic order). The god Thoth recorded the verdict. Osiris ruled the afterlife as a whole; Anubis managed the entry procedure.
Human consequence: This meant that every Egyptian faced Anubis personally. The Book of the Dead (Spell 125) includes a declaration of innocence that the deceased recited before him. If the heart balanced, you entered the Field of Reeds. If it did not, the Devourer (part crocodile, part lion, part hippo) consumed you. The responsibility was individual and the stakes absolute.
Hades did not judge souls within Greek tradition. At most he received them. The underworld had three judges, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos, who assigned souls to Elysion or Tartaros. Hades himself sat on a throne of ebony and was indifferent to the shades that drifted through his realm. He was a ruler, not a referee.
Human consequence: A Greek did not fear Hades’ judgment; they feared his realm. To be shut in Tartaros was punishment for crimes against the gods (Sisyphos, Tantalos). For ordinary people, the afterworld was a gray existence in the Asphodel Meadows, a place so neutral that Odysseus in the Odyssey (Book 11) calls it worse than any life as a serf above ground. The god himself was neither cruel nor kind. He simply was.
How You Spoke to Each
Egyptians prayed to Anubis in life and in death. The Opening of the Mouth ceremony, performed on the mummy before burial, invoked Anubis to restore the deceased’s senses. Embalmers wore a jackal mask in his honor, a concrete link between the living practitioner and the god. The mask was not decorative. It was ritual equipment.
Greeks addressed Hades rarely. He had no widespread public cult. The one major exception was the Eleusinian Mysteries (c. 1500 BCE–400 CE), where Hades appeared as Pluton (the rich one), god of mineral wealth. In this role, he was invoked alongside Persephone. The Mysteries promised initiates a better afterlife, but the rites were secret. What we know is that participants drank a barley drink (kykeon) and viewed objects in the Telesterion. The cult did not involve appealing to Hades as a judge. It involved aligning yourself with the natural cycle of death and rebirth that Persephone’s story dramatized.
What Each God Looked Like
Egyptian art shows Anubis as a man with the head of a black jackal or as a full jackal recumbent on a shrine. The black color represented the rotted flesh of the dead and the fertile black soil of the Nile. He was often painted holding an ankh (life) and a was scepter (power).
Greek art depicts Hades as a bearded man resembling Zeus, but with darker hair and a gloomier expression. He holds a bident (two-pronged staff) or a scepter, and often sits beside Persephone. His helmet of invisibility (the kynée) is shown as a cap. The Villa of the Mysteries fresco at Pompeii (c. 50 BCE) shows Hades in a mystic procession, but his portrayal is consistent: he is the male counterpart of Zeus, not a monster.
Where They Overlap
Syncretism in the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE) brought the two together. Serapis, a god created by Ptolemy I Soter, combined aspects of Osiris, Apis, and the Greek underworld deities. But Anubis also gained a Greek persona: Hermanubis, a fusion of Hermes and Anubis. The god had a human body with the head of a jackal and carried the caduceus. His function was psychopompic, but the name joins Greek and Egyptian traditions explicitly.
Plutarch, in his De Iside et Osiride (c. 100 CE), explains that the Egyptians identified Anubis with the horizon (the boundary between life and death), and that Greeks saw him as the watchman of the dead. Each culture interpreted the other’s god through their own frame.
For those interested in other boundary-walkers, the glossary of psychopomp deities lists figures from multiple traditions who guide souls between worlds.
Misconceptions People Bring
The biggest misunderstanding comes from modern pop culture. Hades is not the devil. Greek religion had no Satan figure. Hades was a god of the underworld, not evil. The Christian notion of hell postdates him by centuries.
Anubis is not the doorkeeper who says “you may not enter.” He is the one who weighs the heart fairly. He presides over judgment but does not execute it. The Devourer does that.
Nor did Hades “rule alone.” Persephone was co-ruler and arguably more feared. The Greeks swore oaths by her alone. In the Orphic Hymns, Hades and Persephone are invoked as a pair.
FAQ
Who is more powerful, Anubis or Hades?
They cannot be compared by power because their domains differ. Hades rules a realm; Anubis judges a soul. In Egyptian theology, Osiris outranks Anubis. In Greek, Hades is a third of the cosmos alongside Zeus and Poseidon.
Did ancient people worship Hades?
Very rarely. He had few temples. At Elis there was a sanctuary but it was opened only once a year. In general, Greeks avoided naming him directly, using euphemisms like “Pluton” or “the Host of Many.”
Is Anubis in the Greek underworld in the same way?
No. Anubis is exclusively Egyptian. The syncretic god Hermanubis had a place in Graeco-Roman cult but never equaled the Greek psychopomp Hermes.
What Their Differences Tell Us
The distance between Anubis and Hades measures the distance between two ancient views of death. An Egyptian died into a judgment that demanded moral accounting. A Greek died into a realm where moral accountability applied only to the very wicked, and everyone else drifted.
We do not have to pick a god. We can sit in that difference and let it teach us something about why cultures imagine the hidden side of existence so differently. For those who study the underworld traditions further, the next step is often to examine the deity hub that holds the full catalog of lords of the dead. And for the Egyptian path in particular, the guide to the Egyptian afterlife follows the soul from the tomb to the Scales. The glossary entry on the Weighing of the Heart explains the procedure itself. Each piece is one more door. We do not open doors to escape. We open them to see what lies behind us.