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In Pyramid Text 306, this conception of ascent was transformed into Unas’s ride in the solar boat. Just as the pharaoh visited his kingdom by means of a boat, so the sun god sails across the skies to his more exalted destinations. As the sun went to rest every night and was gloriously reborn every morning, so also the pharaoh was reborn for eternal happiness in the other world. The eastern horizon of heaven becomes the analogue for entry into paradise:

Going in and out of the eastern doors of heaven among the followers of Re. I know the Eastern souls.

I know that central door from which Re issues in the East. Its south is the pool of Kha-birds, in the place where Re sails with the breeze; its north is the waters of Ro-fowl, in the place where Re sails with rowing. I am the keeper of the halyard on the boat of god; I am the oarsman who does not weary in the barque of Re. (ANET, 33)

There is a suggestion of a test to prove the pharaoh’s divine birth as he ascends heavenward. Although originally used for the pharaoh only, the texts were extended eventually to the pharaoh’s queens by the end of the Sixth Dynasty and by the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties (twenty-first century BCE and later) they were being used by the elite nonroyal class. By the First Intermediate period, the imagery was being used beyond the pharaoh’s family and palace, suggesting that the chaos of the Intermediate period which brought wider and more diffuse political control also brought with it a correspondingly wider access to the benefits of the afterlife.

The Ka, the Akh and the Ba

THE EMBALMING process was a ritual enactment of the myth of Isis and Osiris. It preserved the body for the afterlife, and the techniques of embalming were a secret of the priesthoods. The name of Osiris was affixed to the dead pharaoh, completing the identification of the king with the god. As everyone knows, if only from the tomb of King Tutankhamun in the Eighteenth Dynasty, during the first dynasty of the New Kingdom, the Egyptian pharaohs expected life in the world to come to be physical and pleasurable, just as this life had been. Thus, they saved their possessions for their future life.

So too even in the early period. The tombs of private citizens, not kings, provide the best evidence about the state of belief in life after death during this early period. Persons of high station adorned the walls of their tombs with scenes of everyday life, possibly indicating their conception of life after death. The ka was the most ritually important of all the Egyptian words for a person’s afterlife. The tomb was the “house of the ka,” which could physically dwell in it. The ka was often understood as something like a “twin” or “double.” Thus, the ka was an image of the living person, which after death could be viewed as living on in the tomb, requiring regular food offerings.32 The ka could just as well dwell in a statue, a portrait of the living person, while the deceased’s embalmed body lay below in a sarcophagus.33

But the ka was not just at the tomb. The ka could also dwell in the sky, as this example shows:

He that flieth flieth! He flieth away from you, ye men. He is no longer on earth, he is in the sky. Thou his city-god, his ka is at his side (π). He rusheth at the sky as a heron, he hath kissed the sky as a hawk, he hath leapt skyward as a grasshopper.34

The relationship between Horus and Osiris can be expressed through the agency of the ka. The hieroglyph for ka is two arms raised in adoration or embrace. Thus Horus, as the son of Osiris, can be seen as his worshiper and embracer, sharing his ka. The present pharaoh was then the embracer, the worshiper, the adorer, and the sacred sharer in the essence of his father, Osiris, who was his ka. As Jan Assmann writes:

This constellation of father and son, one in the hereafter, one in the world of the living, is one of the most fundamental elements of ancient Egyptian culture. The funerary cult is based on the idea that only the son is capable of reaching into the world of the dead and of entering