The main parts
- KaLife force, or a person's double. After death, it stayed with the body and needed food, so offerings were brought to the tomb.
- BaWhat made a person who they were. It was shown as a bird with a human head that could leave the tomb and return.
- NameA part of the person, just like the others. As long as a person's name was spoken and read, they continued to exist; an erased name meant disappearance.
The shadow and the heart were also part of the picture. The heart was considered the center of the mind and conscience, and at the judgment in the afterlife, it was placed on the scales against the feather of the goddess of truth.
A person who passed the judgment successfully united their parts into a new state - an enlightened being able to live on. In other words, the goal of the rituals was not to preserve the body as such, but to assemble the person anew.
Then why mummify the body?
The body was embalmed so it could come back to life one day.
The body was needed as a recognizable anchor: the double returned to it, and the ba, depicted as a bird, used it to find its way. Without a preserved body and a name, the person could not be reassembled.
The same logic explains the statues and portraits in the tomb: they served as a spare body. If the mummy was destroyed, the double could rely on the image - insurance against robbery or destruction.
This also explains the practice of erasing names from monuments. It was not a petty act of revenge, but an attempt to cancel a person's existence in eternity - the harshest punishment this system could devise.
It's worth remembering that the picture changed over time. These ideas developed over thousands of years, differed across periods and religious centers, and the neat textbook scheme is a summary of very different sources.
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Sources
- In ancient Egyptian beliefs, a person was described through several components, including the ka, ba, name, shadow, and heart
- the heart was weighed at the judgment in the afterlife against the feather of Ma'at. Preserving the body and images was linked to the need for an anchor for these components. Beliefs differed across periods and religious centers, and the scheme presented here is a summary