Ancient Egypt

Two ideas that prevailed in ancient Egypt came to exert great influence on the concept of death in other cultures. The first was the notion, epitomized in the Osirian myth, of a dying and rising saviour god who could confer on devotees the gift of immortality; this afterlife was first sought by the pharaohs and then by millions of ordinary people. The second was the concept of a postmortem judgment, in which the quality of the deceased’s life would influence his ultimate fate. Egyptian society, it has been said, consisted of the dead, the gods, and the living. During all periods of their history, the ancient Egyptians seem to have spent much of their time thinking of death and making provisions for their afterlife. The vast size, awe-inspiring character, and the ubiquity of their funerary monuments bear testimony to this obsession.

The physical preservation of the body was central to all concerns about an afterlife; the Egyptians were a practical people, and the notion of a disembodied existence would have been totally unacceptable to them. The components of the person were viewed as many, subtle, and complex; moreover, they were thought to suffer different fates at the time of death. The physical body was a person’s khat, a term that implied inherent decay. The ka was the individual’s doppelgänger, or double; it was endowed with all the person’s qualities and faults. It is uncertain where the ka resided during life, but “to go to one’s ka” was a euphemism for death. The ka denoted power and prosperity. After death it could eat, drink, and “enjoy the odour of incense.” It had to be fed, and this task was to devolve on a specific group of priests. The ka gave comfort and protection to the deceased: its hieroglyphic sign showed two arms outstretched upward, in an attitude of embrace.

The ba (often translated as “the soul”) conveyed notions of “the noble” and “the sublime.” It could enter the body or become incorporeal at will. It was represented as a human-headed falcon, presumably to emphasize its mobility. The ba remained sentimentally attached to the dead body, for whose well-being it was somehow responsible. It is often depicted flying about the portal of the tomb or perched on a nearby tree. Although its anatomical substratum was ill-defined, it could not survive without the preserved body.

Other important attributes were an individual’s khu (“spiritual intelligence”), sekhem (“power”), khaibit (“shadow”), and ren (“name”). In the pyramid of King Pepi I, who ruled during the 6th dynasty (c. 2345–c. 2182 bc), it is recorded how the dead king had “walked through the iron which is the ceiling of heaven. With his panther skin upon him, Pepi passeth with his flesh, he is happy with his name, and he liveth with his double.” The depictions of the dead were blueprints for immortality. Conversely, to blot out a person’s name was to destroy that individual for all eternity, to eliminate him from the historical record. The Stalinist and Maoist regimes in the Soviet Union and China were later to resort to the same means, with the same end in mind. They also, however, invented the concept of “posthumous rehabilitation.”

The heart played a central part in how the Egyptians thought about the functioning of the body. Political and religious considerations probably lay behind the major role attributed to the heart. Many of the so-called facts reported in the Ebers papyrus (a kind of medical encyclopaedia dating from the early part of the 18th dynasty; i.e., from about 1550 bc) are really just speculations. This is surprising in view of how often bodies were opened during embalmment. A tubular system was rightly said to go from the heart “to all members” and the heart was said “to speak out of the vessels of every limb.” But the vessels were thought to convey a mixture of air, blood, tears, urine, saliva, nasal mucus, semen, and at times even feces. During the process of embalming, the heart was always left in situ or replaced in the thorax. According to the renowned Orientalist Sir Wallis Budge, the Egyptians saw the heart as the “source of life and being,” and any damage to it would have resulted in a “second death” in which everything (ka, ba, khu, and ren) would be destroyed. In some sarcophagi one can still read the pathetic plea “spare us a second death.”

The anatomical heart was the haty, the word ib referring to the heart as a metaphysical entity embodying not only thought, intelligence, memory, and wisdom, but also bravery, sadness, and love. It was the heart in its sense of ib that was weighed in the famous judgment scene depicted in the Ani papyrus and elsewhere. After the deceased had enumerated the many sins he had not committed (the so-called negative confession), the heart was weighed against the feather of Maʿat (i.e., against what was deemed right and true). It had to prove itself capable of achieving balance with the symbol of the law. The deceased who was judged pure was introduced to Osiris (in fact, became an Osiris). The deceased who failed was devoured by the monster Am-mit, the “eater of the dead.” It was never the physical body on earth that was resurrected, but a new entity (the Sahu) that “germinated” from it and into which the soul would slip.

The Egyptians were concerned that the dead should be able to breathe again. The Pyramid Texts describe the ceremony of the “opening of the mouth,” by which this was achieved. Immediately before the mummy was consigned to the sepulchral chamber, specially qualified priests placed it upright, touched the face with an adz, and proclaimed “thy mouth is opened by Horus with his little finger, with which he also opened the mouth of his father Osiris.” It has proved difficult to relate this ritual, in any meaningful way, to specific beliefs about the ka or ba.

The brain is not mentioned much in any of the extant medical papyruses from ancient Egypt. It is occasionally described as an organ producing mucus, which drained out through the nose; or it is referred to by a generic term applicable to the viscera as a whole. Life and death were matters of the heart, although the suggested relationships were at times bizarre—for example, it was said that the “mind passed away” when the vessels of the heart were contaminated with feces. The only reference that might relate death to the brain stem is the strange statement in the Ebers papyrus (gloss 854f) to the effect that “life entered the body through the left ear, and departed through the right one.”

It is clear why the Egyptians never cremated their dead: to do so would have destroyed for the deceased all prospects of an afterlife. Fortunately, there was no question of organ transplantation; in the prevailing cultural context, it would never have been tolerated. Whether the pharaohs would have been powerful enough—or rash enough—to transgress accepted norms had transplantation been feasible is quite another matter.