the goddess Artemis, while in Hinduism it is linked to the goddess Saraswati. The deer also held spiritual significance to the pastoralist cultures of the Eurasian Steppe. The golden stag figurine found in the Pazyryk burials is one of the most famous pieces of Scythian art. Wolf In the story of Rome's foundation, wolves are used in totemic imagery. The founding brothers Romulus and Remus are raised by a mother wolf, making the wolf the symbolic mother of Rome. Among the Ancient Egyptians, the gods Anubis and Wepwawet both took the form of a wolf, jackal or wild dog, or a man with the head of such a creature. Anubis was a funerary deity, considered the patron of the mummification process and a protector of tombs. In the afterlife, it was he who performed the crucial role in the Weighing of the Heart ceremony that decided the individual's post-mortem fate. In earlier times Anubis was the supreme god of the underworld, but he was later replaced in that role by the human-formed Osiris. It is possible that the Egyptians originally conceived of Anubis as a wild dog because of the animal's location on the outskirts of towns, near the tombs of the dead, or possibly because of their scavenging of corpses, which led them to congregate near tombs. Wepwawet was a deity more focussed on the world of the living, whose chief role was to 'open the way', whether this is opening the way of the pharaoh to victory in battle, opening the way for the priests in a ritual procession, or any other application. The great antiquity of Wepwawet's worship in Egypt is evidenced by the Narmer Palette, made by the very first of the dynastic pharaohs, including the image of a wolf on a standard as a part of a ritual procession. It has been suggested that Wepwawet's depiction as a wolf stems from the animal's keen sense of smell, allowing it to 'open the way' to find something important. Big cats The cult of the leopard is widely found in West Africa. Among the Ashanti people a man who kills one is liable to be put to death; no leopard skin may be exposed to view, but a stuffed leopard is worshipped. On the Gold Coast, a leopard hunter who has killed his victim is carried around the town behind the body of the leopard; he may