The Role of the Body in Ancient Egypt

            There is no other way to describe such a culture, but remarkable. The Egyptian culture was and maybe still is one of the most fascinated and underestimated culture to have ever existed. Its permeance was so strong, that it still remains as influencing today as it were thousands and thousands of years ago.
             The Egyptians were liberal and yet had admirable conviction and commitment to their religion and faith. They lived, not for today but for the amazing life and journey they were sure was awaiting them in death.
             They relied on the nature around them to help understand their place in the universe and their mythology centred itself on the things closest to the Egyptians, the sun, the earth, the sky and the Nile. They were not afraid to die as dying meant living.
             The Egyptian attitude to life and death was influenced by two fundamental beliefs, the first was that death was simply an interruption rather than a complete cessation of life and secondly that eternal life could be insured by various means, including: piety to the gods, the preservation of the body through mummification and the provision of statuary and other funerary equipment. The complexity and gradual elaboration of the Egyptian belief system has been explored by Egyptologists, thanks to surviving funerary artefacts and tombs from ancient Egyptian times.
             The body played a very important part in death and in afterlife. The Egyptians believed that each human body comprised not only of a physical body but also three other crucial elements known as; the KAH, the BAH, and the AKH, each one of these elements was essential to the human survival both before and after death. They also considered that the name & shadow were also living entities crucial to human existence, rather than simply linguistic and natural phenomenon. The essence of each individual was contained in the sum of all these parts, none of which could be neglected. Ensuring maximum afterlife fulfilment was a delicate business which meant all parts of the body needed protection.