Le Porte dell'Anno

Figure above:

The ba as a human-headed bird flies over the sarcophagus of the deceased. Image from the Papyrus of Ani (XIX dynasty, about 1320-1300 B.C.), now in the British Museum.
[Image: http://egyptologypage.tripod.com/religion.html]

In Ancient Egypt, the life components of the person were expressed by three peculiar conceptions: the ba, the ka, and the akh, which were already employed in the Pyramid Texts, a set of ritual formulas attributable to the V dynasty (2500-2350 B.C.). Simplifying a complex matter, it can be sayd that the ba represents the individual personality, the ka the vital force animating the living being, and the akh is a divine energy, a bright hypostasis of creative power, which at death returns to the divine world, glittering as a star.
The survival of the individual after death was represented by the ba. “The nature itself of the ba suggests the post-mortem faculty, pertaining to man, to assume a visible appearance as individual; on the other hand, it is man’s consciousness, his will, precisely because it represents the “animated” man (from which comes the improper use of rendering the term ba with “soul”); despite bodily death, it maintains the individual’s identity, by virtue of the constant relationship with the body and the statue. It is ba which animates the corpse, which permits to the deceased to get out at the light of the sun, to freely move and to assume, in the Otherworld, the different aspects which can be useful for it” (Bongioanni-Tosi 1997: 41-42). In the ancient Pyramid Texts, it is said of the deceased king: “The gods bring you in the sky under your shape of ba, so that you shall be like a ba for them” (Pyr. 799c, Bongioanni-Tosi 1997: 35). In the iconography, the ba was frequently represented as a bird (identified with the black stork, a bird which disappeared from Egypt since the beginning of the historic era) with human head and arms. It is often shown as soaring over the sarcophagus of the deceased. The ba probably signified originally the divine faculty to move and to assume different appearances, a faculty acquired by men after death. In the Coffin Texts, the deceased is transformed successively into aua bird, black heron, shenti heron, ibis, swallow, vulture, goose, all divine hypostases. Several formulas permitted furthermore the dead’s transformation in the divine falcon Horus (Bongioanni-Tosi 1991: 114). It is possible that an influence of Egyptian iconography of the ba of the deceased, as a human-headed bird, could be discovered in the Etruscan and Greek figures of the Sirens, which were sometimes associated with funerary cults.

Figure below:

Statuette in painted wood, reproducing the ba of the deceased, dating to the Ptolemaic Period (330-30 B.C.) noew in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
[Image: http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/ba-bird-statuette-36496]




World of the Dead

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Figure above: The ba as a human-headed bird flies over the sarcophagus of the deceased. Image from the Papyrus of Ani (XIX dynasty, about 1320-1300 B.C.), now in the British Museum. [Image: http://egyptologypage.tripod.com/religion.html] In Ancient Egypt, the life components of the person were expressed by three peculiar conceptions: the ba, the ka, and the akh, which were already employed in the Pyramid Texts, a set of ritual formulas attributable to the V dynasty (2500-2350 B.C.). Simplifying a complex matter, it can be sayd that the ba represents the individual personality, the ka the vital force animating the living being, and the akh is a divine energy, a bright hypostasis of creative power, which at death returns to the divine world, glittering as a star. The survival of the individual after death was represented by the ba. “The nature itself of the ba suggests the post-mortem faculty, pertaining to man, to assume a visible appearance as individual; on the other hand, it is man’s consciousness, his will, precisely because it represents the “animated” man (from which comes the improper use of rendering the term ba with “soul”); despite bodily death, it maintains the individual’s identity, by virtue of the constant relationship with the body and the statue. It is ba which animates the corpse, which permits to the deceased to get out at the light of the sun, to freely move and to assume, in the Otherworld, the different aspects which can be useful for it” (Bongioanni-Tosi 1997: 41-42). In the ancient Pyramid Texts, it is said of the deceased king: “The gods bring you in the sky under your shape of ba, so that you shall be like a ba for them” (Pyr. 799c, Bongioanni-Tosi 1997: 35). In the iconography, the ba was frequently represented as a bird (identified with the black stork, a bird which disappeared from Egypt since the beginning of the historic era) with human head and arms. It is often shown as soaring over the sarcophagus of the deceased. The ba probably signified originally the divine faculty to move and to assume different appearances, a faculty acquired by men after death. In the Coffin Texts, the deceased is transformed successively into aua bird, black heron, shenti heron, ibis, swallow, vulture, goose, all divine hypostases. Several formulas permitted furthermore the dead’s transformation in the divine falcon Horus (Bongioanni-Tosi 1991: 114). It is possible that an influence of Egyptian iconography of the ba of the deceased, as a human-headed bird, could be discovered in the Etruscan and Greek figures of the Sirens, which were sometimes associated with funerary cults. Figure below: Statuette in painted wood, reproducing the ba of the deceased, dating to the Ptolemaic Period (330-30 B.C.) noew in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. [Image: http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/ba-bird-statuette-36496]