ABSTRACT
The ancient Egyptian view of human life, death and the afterlife evolved over thousands of years; it was not fully formed in the earliest period. The exposition from mortuary texts, as well as artifactual and testimonial evidence, strongly indicates that the ancient Egyptians did not hold anything like a dualistic idea of human nature, as John Taylor says. The Egyptians distinguished between the earthly and the unearthly body with separate words: the words khet (form) and iru (appearance) referred to the earthly body in this life. The heart was also the seat of cognitive activities and hence the locus of knowledge, memory and imagination. The special faculty or power that enabled the gods to perceive an event when it occurred was called sia, whose limit concept embraced all the possible knowledge brought into being by the original act of world creation.
