LIFE AND DEATH IN ANCIENT EGYPT
During the long history of Ancient Egypt – spanning approximately 3000 BC to 30 BC – both the pharaohs and their subjects regarded life and death as part of a continuous process. Death was not an end, but the beginning of another stage: the ‘Afterlife’.
This was considered possible because it was believed that each person was made up of both physical and invisible parts - their name, their body and its shadow, plus their life-force (known as the ‘ka’) and their spirit (‘ba’). With these separate elements brought together at birth to work together during a person’s lifetime, death was simply a transition, after which the ka and ba lived on.
Yet the ka and ba still needed the body as their home, so it was preserved by mummification. The mummified body was placed in its coffin for elaborate funerary rites, which culminated in the ‘Opening of the Mouth’, a ceremony designed to reanimate the senses and the ka and the ba.
“The Book of the Dead acted as a kind of a guide to the Underworld’s various regions”
The ‘reactivated’ body was then placed inside its tomb, inscribed with the tomb owner’s name and surrounded by everything that person had used in life, and accompanied by other objects made especially for burial – including statues of the deceased so that if the body was damaged by robbers, the ka and ba could
