The Ancient Egyptians believed firmly in an afterlife, and death was a brief interruption to an existence that continued beyond the grave for eternity, in a world much like the one which they inhabited in life.
The Egyptians thought that the human body was home to 3 main spirits that were released when a person died. This were the 'Ka', a person's life force, which were represented by a pair of up-stretched arms; the 'Ba', a wandering soul, which was commonly depicted as a human-headed spirit-bird; and the 'Akh', a kind of ghost that was represented by the crested ibis. The ghost was deemed to return to the stars at death, and the wandering soul a the person's life force depended on the body for survival. The preservation of the body was essential if life was to continue after death.
In Pre-dynastic times, most people were buried in shallow graves directly in the sand, and often accompanied by funerary goods. The sand dried the body, leaving many corpses well preserved.
The first story concerned with death and rebirth is that of Osiris. The ancient Egyptians believed that their gods had originally ruled on Earth before them, and that Osiris, one of the first kings of Egypt, had been killed by his treacherous brother Set, and his body cut into pieces and scattered. However, his wife and sister, Isis, recovered the pieces and was shown by Anubis how to bind him together with linen bandages. He came to life briefly and fathered a son, Horus, who then inherited his throne.
Osiris, meanwhile, was made king of the Land of the Dead (Duat) or the Underworld, and became the god of death and resurrection.
During the Old Kingdom, from the 4th Dynasty onwards, each king, or pharaoh, came to be regarded as the living embodiment of the god Horus, who would become one with Osiris at death, to return to spend eternal life with the gods.
The cult of Osiris promoted the belief that all the people of Egypt would share in eternal life in the "Field of Reeds," an idealized kingdom of eternal spring, but in practice the idea was first extended to the nobility, as is seen in the "Coffin Texts" on the Middle Kingdom, which were placed within the coffins of important or wealthy people, and later, in the New Kingdom, as extracts from the "Book of the Dead" came to be placed in even the poorest people's graves. These practices developed alongside a belief in a personal final judgment that provided everyone with an opportunity of entry into the afterlife.
Prior to the spread of the belief in a final judgment, acceptance into the afterlife was believed to be guaranteed if a person had conducted their life according to the principles of Maat, the Egyptian notion of order and morality, but following a breakdown in order during the First Intermediate Period, the idea was promoted that individuals would actually be judged before the gods by Osiris for their earthly actions.
First, a person had to undertake a perilous journey through the Underworld, accompanied by their wandering soul (Ba), in order to reach the Hall of Judgment, where, in front of Osiris and 42 assistants, they would deny having committed any of the long list of sins, before proceeding to the next stage, the Weighing of the Heart. The jackal-headed Anubis would place their heart on a pair of scales, where it had to balance exactly with the feather of Truth, belonging to the goddess Maat. If the heart was heavy with sin, then it would be eaten by Ammut, the 'Devourer of Souls,' a terrifying beast with the head of a crocodile, the forequarters of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus.
As the heart was believed to contain the "true self"of the individual, then if the heart was heavy of sin, the person cease to exist, and be denied passage to eternal life. However, if the scales balanced, the individual would be permitted to join Osiris in the afterlife, and his spirit was free to move between the lands of the living and the death.
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