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Jar in which organs are kept

Canopic jars are containers that were used by the ancient Egyptians during the mummification process, to store and preserve the viscera of their owner for the afterlife. The earliest and most common versions were made from stone, but later styles were carved from wood. The ritual use of the jars dates back as far as the Old Kingdom and stayed in practice until the Late Period or the Ptolemaic Period, by which time the viscera were simply wrapped and placed with the body. Canopic jars of the Old Kingdom were rarely inscribed and had a plain lid, but by the Middle Kingdom inscriptions became more usual, and the lids were often in the form of human heads. By the Nineteenth Dynasty each of the four lids depicted one of the four sons of Horus, actings as guardians for the respective organ in their jar.

The term canopic reflects the mistaken association by early Egyptologists with the Greek legend of Canopus – the boat captain of Menelaus on the voyage to Troy – "who was buried at Canopus in the Delta where he was worshipped in the form of a jar". In alternative versions, the name derives from the location Canopus (now Abukir) in the western Nile Delta near Alexandria, where human headed jars were worshipped as personifications of the god Osiris.

Canopic jars are v shaped vessels that are hollowed out in the middle and topped with either plain or iconographic stoppers. They ranged in heights from about 14 cm 50 cm (including the lid), and in diameters anywhere from 6 cm 20 cm. The most common materials used to make the jars include wood, limestone, faience, and clay, and the design was occasionally accompanied by painted on facial features, names of the deceased or the gods, and/or burial spells. Early canopic jars were placed inside a canopic chest and buried in tombs together with the sarcophagus of the dead. Later, they were sometimes arranged in rows beneath the bier, or at the four corners of the chamber. The human heads were the iconized representations of the Sons of Horus in their human form and were the predominant styling for the jars through ancient Egypt until the New Kingdom in Nineteenth Dynasty, in which the style transitioned to the more well known depiction of the animal heads. Many higher quality sets from this period were crafted from minerals such as alabaster, aragonite, calcareous stone, and blue or green glazed porcelain.

The practice of evisceration began early in the Old Kingdom, but the specific use of the jars as storage for the organs was not well established until the First Intermediate Period. At the time of mummification, the lungs, liver, stomach, and intestines were removed from the corpse to prevent them from eating away at the rest of the body. Each organ was salted in natron and placed individually into one of the four canopic jars. If it was too heavy from bad deeds it would be fed to a monster, Ammit, that was believed to be part lion, part hippopotamus, and part crocodile.|group= n)

Canopic jars from the Old Kingdom were found empty and damaged, even in undisturbed tombs, suggesting that they were part of the burial ritual rather than being used to hold the organs. The Third Intermediate Period and beyond adopted a similar practice, placing much smaller dummy jars in the tombs without including the organs. Improved embalming techniques allowed the viscera to remain in the body; the traditional jars remained a feature of tombs, but were no longer hollowed out for storing the organs.

In 2020, excavations at Saqqara showed that a woman called Didibastet, whose 2,600 year old undisturbed tomb was discovered behind a stone wall, was entombed with six canopic jars instead of the traditional four. A CT scan revealed that the jars contain human tissue, suggesting that Didibastet's mummification was possibly the result of a specific request.