Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul

Akh redirects here. For the French hip-hop artist, see 3 Ren (name)
Akhenaton (rapper).
As a part of the soul, a persons ren (rn 'name') was given
The ancient Egyptians believed that a human soul was to them at birth and the Egyptians believed that it would
made up of ve parts: the Ren, the Ba, the Ka, the Sheut,live for as long as that name was spoken, which explains
and the Ib. In addition to these components of the soul why eorts were made to protect it and the practice of
there was the human body (called the ha, occasionally a placing it in numerous writings. For example, part of
plural haw, meaning approximately sum of bodily parts). the Book of Breathings, a derivative of the Book of the
The other souls were aakhu, khaibut, and khat. Dead, was a means to ensure the survival of the name.
A cartouche (magical rope) often was used to surround
the name and protect it. Conversely, the names of de-
ceased enemies of the state, such as Akhenaten, were
hacked out of monuments in a form of damnatio memo-
1 Ib (heart) riae. Sometimes, however, they were removed in order to
make room for the economical insertion of the name of
a successor, without having to build another monument.
An important part of the Egyptian soul was thought to be
[1] The greater the number of places a name was used, the
the Ib (jb), or heart. The Ib or metaphysical heart was
greater the possibility it would survive to be read and spo-
believed to be formed from one drop of blood from the
[2] ken.
childs mothers heart, taken at conception.
To ancient Egyptians, the heart was the seat of emotion,
thought, will and intention. This is evidenced by the 4 Ba (personality)
many expressions in the Egyptian language which incor-
porate the word ib, Awt-ib: happiness (literally, wideness
of heart), Xak-ib: estranged (literally, truncated of heart).
This word was transcribed by Wallis Budge as Ab.
In Egyptian religion, the heart was the key to the afterlife.
It was conceived as surviving death in the nether world,
where it gave evidence for, or against, its possessor. It
was thought that the heart was examined by Anubis and
the deities during the Weighing of the Heart ceremony. If
the heart weighed more than the feather of Maat, it was
immediately consumed by the monster Ammit.

2 Sheut (shadow)

A persons shadow or silhouette, Sheut (wt in Egyptian),

is always present. Because of this, Egyptians surmised
that a shadow contains something of the person it rep-
resents. Through this association, statues of people and
deities were sometimes referred to as shadows.
The shadow was also representative to Egyptians of
a gure of death, or servant of Anubis, and was de-
picted graphically as a small human gure painted com- Ba takes the form of a bird with a human head.
pletely black. Sometimes people (usually pharaohs) had
a shadow box in which part of their Sheut was stored. The 'Ba' (b ) was everything that makes an individual

1
2 6 AKH

them into their mothers bodies. Depending on the re-

This golden Ba amulet from the Ptolemaic period would have
been worn as an apotropaic device. Walters Art Museum,
Baltimore.
gion, Egyptians believed that Heket or Meskhenet was
the creator of each persons Ka, breathing it into them
at the instant of their birth as the part of their soul that
made them be alive. This resembles the concept of spirit
in other religions.
The Egyptians also believed that the ka was sustained
through food and drink. For this reason food and drink
oerings were presented to the dead, although it was
the kau (k w) within the oerings that was consumed,
not the physical aspect. The ka was often represented
in Egyptian iconography as a second image of the king,
leading earlier works to attempt to translate ka as double.

6 Akh
unique, similar to the notion of 'personality'. (In this
sense, inanimate objects could also have a 'Ba', a unique
character, and indeed Old Kingdom pyramids often were
called the 'Ba' of their owner). The 'Ba' is an aspect
of a person that the Egyptians believed would live after
the body died, and it is sometimes depicted as a human-
headed bird ying out of the tomb to join with the 'Ka' in
the afterlife.
In the Con Texts one form of the Ba that comes into
existence after death is corporeal, eating, drinking and
copulating. Louis abkar argued that the Ba is not part
of the person but is the person himself, unlike the soul in
Greek, or late Judaic, Christian or Muslim thought. The
idea of a purely immaterial existence was so foreign to
Egyptian thought that when Christianity spread in Egypt
they borrowed the Greek word psyche to describe the con-
cept of soul and not the term Ba. abkar concludes that
so particular was the concept of Ba to ancient Egyptian
thought that it ought not to be translated but instead the
concept be footnoted or parenthetically explained as one
of the modes of existence for a person.[3] Akh glyph

In another mode of existence the Ba of the deceased is

depicted in the Book of Going Forth by Day returning to
the mummy and participating in life outside the tomb in
non-corporeal form, echoing the solar theology of Re (or
Ra) uniting with Osiris each night.[4]
The word 'bau' (bw), plural of the word ba, meant some-
thing similar to 'impressiveness, 'power', and 'reputation',
particularly of a deity. When a deity intervened in human
aairs, it was said that the 'Bau' of the deity were at work
[Borghouts 1982].
5 Ka (vital spark)
The Ka (k ) was the Egyptian concept of vital essence,
that which distinguishes the dierence between a living
and a dead person, with death occurring when the ka left
the body. The Egyptians believed that Khnum created
the bodies of children on a potters wheel and inserted
The Akh ( meaning '(magically) eective one'),[5] was
a concept of the dead that varied over the long history of
ancient Egyptian belief.
It was associated with thought, but not as an action of
the mind; rather, it was intellect as a living entity. The
Akh also played a role in the afterlife. Following the
death of the Khat (physical body), the Ba and Ka were
reunited to reanimate the Akh.[6] The reanimation of the
Akh was only possible if the proper funeral rites were ex-
ecuted and followed by constant oerings. The ritual was
termed: se-akh 'to make (a dead person) into an (living)
akh.' In this sense, it even developed into a sort of ghost
or roaming 'dead being' (when the tomb was not in order
any more) during the Ramesside Period. An Akh could
do either harm or good to persons still living, depending
on the circumstances, causing e.g., nightmares, feelings
of guilt, sickness, etc. It could be evoked by prayers or
written letters left in the tombs oering chapel also in
order to help living family members, e.g., by intervening
 3

in disputes, by making an appeal to other dead persons or containing spells to assure not dying a second time in
deities with any authority to inuence things on earth for the underworld, and to grant memory always to a per-
the better, but also to inict punishments. son. In the Egyptian religion it was possible to die in the
The separation of Akh and the unication of Ka and Ba afterlife and this death was permanent.
were brought about after death by having the proper of- The tomb of Paheri, an Eighteenth dynasty nomarch of
ferings made and knowing the proper, ecacious spell, Nekhen, has an eloquent description of this existence, and
but there was an attendant risk of dying again. Egyptian is translated by James P. Allen as:
funerary literature (such as the Con Texts and the Book
of the Dead) were intended to aid the deceased in not Your life happening again, without your ba
dying a second time and to aid in becoming an akh. being kept away from your divine corpse, with
your ba being together with the akh ... You
shall emerge each day and return each evening.
6.1 The Ghost of Akhenaten
A lamp will be lit for you in the night until the
sunlight shines forth on your breast. You shall
The Pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled from 13531335
be told: Welcome, welcome, into this your
BCE, was a follower of the god Aten, the sun god, and
house of the living!"
declared that he and his wife Nefertiti were Atens sole
representatives on Earth. He dismantled the elaborate
religious structure of Ancient Egypt that was based on
Amun and many other gods, abolishing its worship, dis- 8 See also
missing priests and demolishing temples. After Akhen-
atens death the old religion revived, and it is said that Afterlife in Ancient Egyptian religion
the priests cursed him to wander as a ghost for the rest of
time. To this day people still claim to have met Akhen- Ancient Egypt
atens ghost in the deserts of Egypt.[7]
Death in ancient Egypt

7 Relationships
Ancient Egyptians believed that death occurs when a
persons ka leaves the body. Ceremonies conducted by
priests after death, including the "opening of the mouth
(wp r)", aimed not only to restore a persons physical abil-
ities in death, but also to release a Bas attachment to the
body. This allowed the Ba to be united with the Ka in
the afterlife, creating an entity known as an "Akh" ( ,
meaning eective one).
Egyptians conceived of an afterlife as quite similar to
normal physical existence but with a dierence. The
model for this new existence was the journey of the Sun.
At night the Sun descended into the Duat (the under-
world). Eventually the Sun meets the body of the mum-
mied Osiris. Osiris and the Sun, re-energized by each
other, rise to new life for another day. For the deceased,
their body and their tomb were their personal Osiris and
a personal Duat. For this reason they are often addressed
as Osiris. For this process to work, some sort of bod-
ily preservation was required, to allow the Ba to return
during the night, and to rise to new life in the morning.
However, the complete Akhu were also thought to appear
as stars.[8] Until the Late Period, non-royal Egyptians did
not expect to unite with the Sun deity, it being reserved
for the royals.[9]
The Book of the Dead, the collection of spells which aided
a person in the afterlife, had the Egyptian name of the
Book of going forth by day. They helped people avoid
the perils of the afterlife and also aided their existence,
Ghosts
Mummy
Opening of the mouth ceremony
9 Notes
[1] Britannica, Ib
[2] Slider, Ab, Egyptian heart and soul conception
[3] "A Study of the Ba Concept In Ancient Egyptian Texts.", p.
162163, Louis V. abkar, University of Chicago Press,
1968.
[4] Oxford Guide: The Essential Guide to Egyptian Mythol-
ogy, James P. Allen, p. 28, Berkley, 2003, ISBN 0-425-
19096-X
[5] Allen, James W. Middle Egyptian : An Introduction to the
Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-77483-7.
[6] Egyptology online, 2009
[7] Moyra Caldecott (2003). The Ghost of Akhenaten. Mush-
room Publishing. p. 1. ISBN 1-84319-024-9.
[8] Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Interpretation by Henri
Frankfort, p. 100. 2000 edition, rst copyright 1948.
Google Books preview retrieved January 19, 2008.
[9] 26th Dynasty stela description from Kunsthistorisches
Museum Vienna
4 11 FURTHER READING

10 References
Egyptology online (2001), The concept of the after-
life, archived from the original on 2008-04-21, re-
trieved 2009

11 Further reading
Allen, James Paul. 2001. Ba. In The Oxford En-
cyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald Bruce
Redford. Vol. 1 of 3 vols. Oxford, New York, and
Cairo: Oxford University Press and The American
University in Cairo Press. 161162.

Allen, James P. 2000. Middle Egyptian: An In-

troduction to the Language and Culture of Hiero-
glyphs, Cambridge University Press.
Borghouts, Joris Frans. 1982. Divine Intervention
in Ancient Egypt and Its Manifestation (b3w)". In
Gleanings from Deir el-Medna, edited by Robert
Johannes Demare and Jacobus Johannes Janssen.
Egyptologische Uitgaven 1. Leiden: Nederlands In-
stituut voor het Nabije Oosten. 170.
Borioni, Giacomo C. 2005. Der Ka aus religion-
swissenschaftlicher Sicht, Verentlichungen der
Institute fr Afrikanistik und gyptologie der Uni-
versitt Wien.
Burroughs, William S. 1987. The Western Lands,
Viking Press. (ction).

Friedman, Florence Margaret Dunn. 1981. On the

Meaning of Akh (3) in Egyptian Mortuary Texts.
Doctoral dissertation; Waltham: Brandeis Univer-
sity, Department of Classical and Oriental Studies.

. 2001. Akh. In The Oxford Encyclopedia

of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald Bruce Redford.
Vol. 1 of 3 vols. Oxford, New York, and Cairo: Ox-
ford University Press and The American University
in Cairo Press. 4748.
Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Princeton
University.

abkar, Louis Vico. 1968. A Study of the Ba Con-

cept in Ancient Egyptian Texts. Studies in Ancient
Oriental Civilization 34. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press
 5

12 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

12.1 Text
Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_concept_of_the_soul?oldid=704400128
Contributors: Dan~enwiki, Malcolm Farmer, Rmhermen, Stevertigo, Lir, Shyamal, Skysmith, TUF-KAT, Andres, Sam Spade, Hadal,
Mboverload, Rdsmith4, Sam Hocevar, Adashiel, Canterbury Tail, C12H22O11, Florian Blaschke, Xezbeth, Dbachmann, Corvun, Ben-
der235, Kbh3rd, Carlon, Kwamikagami, HasharBot~enwiki, DreamGuy, Harej, FeanorStar7, Benbest, Nefertum17, KickAir8P~, -Ril-,
Gimboid13, Shaharazhod, Josh Parris, Vary, The wub, Ian Pitchford, Aquastor, RexNL, Srleer, Bgwhite, YurikBot, Retodon8, D. F.
Schmidt, Alonelymun, Lt-wiki-bot, Allens, Mmcannis, That Guy, From That Show!, SmackBot, Lcarsdata, InverseHypercube, Zerida,
Unyoyega, C.Fred, Flamarande, Bluebot, Strijbosf, Leoboudv, Kcordina, Dreadstar, Astroview120mm, Gurdjie, A. Parrot, Asatruer,
Iridescent, Shoeofdeath, Tawkerbot2, JForget, InvisibleK, Reahad, Phantomphreak, Ntsimp, Meno25, Isakadams123, Synergy, Doug
Weller, Thijs!bot, Epbr123, LietKynes, SoofoSKb, The Palehammer, Alphachimpbot, JAnDbot, Je Dahl, JNW, Aka042, Froid, Cliau,
Anaxial, Maurice Carbonaro, Penguinwithin, Belovedfreak, In Transit, 83d40m, Redtigerxyz, VolkovBot, Tunnels of Set, Philip True-
man, TXiKiBoT, Apepch7, Aymatth2, IPSOS, Wiae, FinnWiki, Tcrichards, Sidriel.13, Fbarw, Macy, Hamiltondaniel, ClueBot, Go-
rillaWarfare, Amovrvs, CounterVandalismBot, Richerman, Versus22, Editor2020, BodhisattvaBot, AndreNatas, Sonty567, Richard-of-
Earth, Maimai009, Addbot, Vatrena ptica, Morning277, Favonian, Lilsis071496, Tide rolls, Yobot, TaBOT-zerem, KamikazeBot, Je-
sielt, AnomieBOT, Taam, Materialscientist, Solbaken, Jackiestud, Khruner, RibotBOT, Ellenois, Success34, FrescoBot, BenzolBot, Igitur,
Pinethicket, I dream of horses, MastiBot, Sarelmo, , Fiberglass Monkey, Fastilysock, Yappy2bhere, Hyarmendacil, BCtl, Katherine,
RA0808, Ivostefanov, Augurar, Skylight 555, ClueBot NG, Piast93, Kasirbot, Widr, Danim, Pluma, MusikAnimal, ElliePie2000, Himanth
199, Iry-Hor, Epicgenius, KierraF, RickLive, Gingerlime, Iamicecube, Velonis999, Bowtiesarecool2, UranusSanders, XXX ILLUMINAZI
XXX, MartinZ02 and Anonymous: 181

12.2 Images
File:Aker.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Aker.svg License: GFDL Contributors: Own work Original
artist: Je Dahl
File:Akh_glyph.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Akh_glyph.svg License: Public domain Contributors:
Own work Original artist: Shyamal
File:Ancient_Egypt_Wings.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Ancient_Egypt_Wings.svg License:
GFDL Contributors: This vector image was created with Inkscape by Je Dahl. Original artist: Je Dahl
File:Ba_bird.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Ba_bird.svg License: GFDL Contributors: Own work
Original artist: Je Dahl
File:Djed.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Djed.svg License: GFDL Contributors: Own work Original
artist: Je Dahl
File:Egyptian_-_Ba_Bird_-_Walters_571472.jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Egyptian_
-_Ba_Bird_-_Walters_571472.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Walters Art Museum: <a href='http://thewalters.org/'
data-x-rel='nofollow'><img alt='Nuvola lesystems folder home.svg' src='https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/
thumb/8/81/Nuvola_filesystems_folder_home.svg/20px-Nuvola_filesystems_folder_home.svg.png' width='20' height='20'
srcset='https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Nuvola_filesystems_folder_home.svg/30px-Nuvola_
filesystems_folder_home.svg.png 1.5x, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Nuvola_filesystems_
folder_home.svg/40px-Nuvola_filesystems_folder_home.svg.png 2x' data-le-width='128' data-le-height='128' /></a>
Home page <a href='http://art.thewalters.org/detail/14425' data-x-rel='nofollow'><img alt='Information icon.svg' src='https:
//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Information_icon.svg/20px-Information_icon.svg.png' width='20' height='20'
srcset='https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Information_icon.svg/30px-Information_icon.svg.png 1.5x,
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Information_icon.svg/40px-Information_icon.svg.png 2x' data-le-
width='620' data-le-height='620' /></a> Info about artwork Original artist: Anonymous (Egypt)
File:Eye_of_Horus_bw.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Eye_of_Horus_bw.svg License: GFDL
Contributors: Own work Original artist: Je Dahl
File:Kheper.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Kheper.svg License: GFDL Contributors: Own work
Original artist: Je Dahl
File:Pyramidi_aavikolla.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Pyramidi_aavikolla.png License: Public
domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Symbol_book_class2.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Symbol_book_class2.svg License: CC
BY-SA 2.5 Contributors: Mad by Lokal_Prol by combining: Original artist: Lokal_Prol
File:Text_document_with_red_question_mark.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Text_document_
with_red_question_mark.svg License: Public domain Contributors: Created by bdesham with Inkscape; based upon Text-x-generic.svg
from the Tango project. Original artist: Benjamin D. Esham (bdesham)

12.3 Content license

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0