• Tombs—Windows to Ancient Beliefs
    Awake!—2005 | December 8

    • The Egyptian Afterlife

      Egypt’s pyramids near Cairo and burial chambers in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor are among the most famous of all ancient tombs. To the early Egyptians, the word for “tomb” was the same as for “house”​—per. “So there was a house during life and a house after death,” says Christine El Mahdy in her book Mummies, Myth and Magic in Ancient Egypt. She also states that “according to [the Egyptians’] beliefs, the survival of the body was necessary for the survival of the other aspects of their being: the ka, the ba and the akh.”

      The ka was a spiritual copy of the physical body and included its expectations, desires, and needs. After death the ka left the body and inhabited the tomb. Because the ka needed everything that the person had needed during life, “the goods placed in the tomb were primarily to satisfy its needs,” writes El Mahdy. The ba could be likened to a person’s character or personality and was pictured by a bird with a human head. The ba entered the body at birth and left the body at death. The third entity, the Akh, “germinated” from the mummy as magic spells were said over it.a The Akh inhabited the world of the gods.

      In dividing a person into three entities, the Egyptians went one step further than the ancient Greek philosophers who divided humans into two entities​—the body and a conscious “soul.” Still a popular teaching, this concept finds no support in the Bible, which states: “The living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all.”​—Ecclesiastes 9:5.