What, exactly, makes a person a person? In this episode, Kara and Amber launch a new series exploring the anatomy of the ancient Egyptian soul. They begin with the ba—often translated as “soul,” but far stranger and more powerful than that simple word suggests. The ba is the part of you that moves, that transforms, that survives death. Drawing from art, funerary texts, and literary works like The Dialogue of a Man with His Ba, the Egyptians unpack how the ba functioned as a mobile, solar, and deeply dynamic aspect of the individual.

What emerges is an understanding that the ancient Egyptians did not view the self as singular. They saw it as layered and multifaceted—existing everywhere all at once: still and enduring, yet constantly in motion.

This episode begins a multipart exploration of the ancient Egyptian individual—from the ba to the ka, the name, the heart, and beyond—asking how this ancient civilization imagined identity, survival, and how the Egyptians sought eternal existence in a world where death is inevitable.

Notes

Allen, James P. 2011. The debate between a man and his soul: a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian literature. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 44. Leiden: Brill.

Janák, Jiří. 2016. Ba. In Jacco Dieleman, Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles. http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002k7g85

Lichtheim, Miriam. 1973. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.