In addition to their information on ancient technical understanding of anatomy, healing manuals can be usefully analyzed for ancient general vocabularies of human bodily existence, as explored also from the funerary literature by Rune Nyord (2009). From the written sources, special words are known for aspects or elements of the individual, as often emphasized in modern summaries on ancient Egyptian afterlife: words translated body (khat), limbs (haw and awt), name (ren), shadow (shut), and heart (more awkwardly for us the two words ib and haty), as well as three terms often translated as spirit or soul (akh, ba, ka). Rather than combining these into an ahistorical ancient individual, all of these need to be set in context, including date and immediate compositional context. Ancient religious writings sometimes provide their own combinations; these might be taken as proof that each must be different in essence, but most human languages allow for synonyms and overlaps—consider the wide range of uses of English soul and spirit. Moreover, some sources reflect rituals of embalming, where the body might be more likely to be listed as a series of separate parts. On a block from the tomb chapel for the overseer of fields Amenemhat (Waset, about 1250 Bc), each of the four children of Horus, guardians of the internal organs, brings one part or aspect of the person—heart, foa-soul, ka-energy, and image or body. Although the scene helps to identify four primary features of the human in this period, the number four is the number of Horus children, not a catalogue of the human (Taylor 2001, 14-16).
Depiction of separate items does not necessarily imply a claim that these are dissected autonomous parts of the person. Another type of religious composition aligns each in a series of anatomical parts with a named deity, to ensure the divinity of the combined body; the same approach is found in literary compositions (and outside Egypt in the Biblical Song of Solomon). These list only physical body parts, omitting three types of term often found in Egyptological descriptions of the ancient Egyptian concept of the human, the intangible or invisible forces such as ba or ka; summarizing terms such as image or body; and generalizing terms such as limbs (ha'w, ‘awt) or the wekhedu. The lists of parts show how the physical body could be catalogued and then each part expressed as a divine dimension (Quack 1995). Assmann has documented how the same body part could be aligned with different deities: the nose could be Wepwawet (jackal) or Thoth (ibis). Clearly, then, the literal association of a body part with a deity was not the important point; rather, the lists establish a general principle that the human body is divine, or made divine, through the rituals of healing, including the ultimate healing process, embalming for eternal life.
World History
