esses
also a soul called a _ba_. In later times we see that every man
possessed a _ba_, and we learn that each god possessed several
_ba's_. But it is in the pyramid texts that we learn for the
first time of the _ba_ of a man, and that man is a king. When
death comes, the _ba_ takes flight in the form of a bird or
whatever form it wills. All seems confused. The _ka_ was near the
body, the _ka_ was in the field of Earu, under the earth
ploughing and sowing; the _ba_ is fluttering on the branches of
the tree on earth, the _ba_ has fled like a falcon to the
heavens, and has been set as a star among the stars. The dead
king lives with the gods and is fed by them. The goddesses give
him the breast. He lives in the Island of Food. He lives in Earu,
the Underworld, a land like Egypt, with fields and canals and
flood and harvest. He shares with the gods in the offerings made
in the great temples on earth.

It is quite clear that all this is an expression of
dissatisfaction with the old belief in the simple duplicate
world, the world of Earu under the earth. It is noteworthy that
this first appears in royal tombs. These texts are written for
kings alone. It is only many centuries later that the texts of
the book of the dead showed similar possibilities open to the
common man. This is the usual course of all advances in Egypt,--
architecture, sculpture, writing, whatever gain in skill or
knowledge there is, appears first in the service of the royal
family. Thus, even in the conception of immortality, the new
ideas, the better immortality was first thought out for the
benefit of the king. The basis for this lay simply in the life on
earth. The king had come early to have a sort of divinity
ascribed to him. His chief name was the Horus name. Menes was the
Horus Aha; Cheops was the Horus Mejeru; Pepy II was the Horus
Netery-khau. But he was also the son of Ra, the sun-god, endued
with life forever. The king was a god, and it could only be that
in his future life he shared the life of the gods. Thus, all is
no more confused or mysterious than is the conception of the life
of the gods themselves.

But the texts go even further than this and identify the dead
god-man, who as Horus was king on earth, with the father of
Horus, the dead god of the earth, Osiris. This identification of
the dead man with the dead god Osiris was later enlarged to
include all men, and became in the Ptolemaic period the most
charac