renp), and became, as the texts occasionally express it, “the living Ka in its coffin.” The rich founded endowments whose revenues were to be expended to all time in providing their Kas with food offerings, and bequeathed certain sums for the maintenance of priests to attend to this; large staffs of officials were kept up to provide the necessaries of life for the Personalities of the dead.[13] The Ka was represented by statues of the dead man which were placed within his tomb, and sometimes in temples also by gracious permission of the sovereign.[14] Wherever one of these statues stood, there might the Ka sojourn and take part in Feasts of Offerings and the pleasures of earthly life; there even seems to have been a belief that it might be imprisoned in a statue by means of certain magic formulæ. Royal statues in the temples were destined to the use of the royal Kas, the many statues of the same king in one temple being apparently all intended for his own Ka service.[15]
The Egyptians, holding the belief that the statue of a human being represented and embodied a human Ka, concluded that the statues of the gods represented and embodied divine Kas, and were indeed neither more nor less than the Kas of the gods. Thus the idea of divinity became entirely anthropomorphic, and, just as the king built his temple not to himself but to his Personality, so also sanctuaries were sometimes dedicated not to a god himself but to his Personality. For example, the chief temple of Memphis was not for the service of the god Ptah,—the maker of the world, whom the Greeks compared to Hephæstos,—but rather for that of his Ka. (Ptah was not alone among the gods in this respect. The pyramid texts show that even in the times of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties Thot, Set, Horus, and other gods were recognised as having Kas; that is to say, each was supposed to be possessed of his own Personality in addition to himself.[16] It was believed that the divine Ka, this image which had the greater likeness to man, stood nearer to man than the god himself, and hence in the case of votive stelæ dedicated to the incarnation of Ptah in the sacred Apis-bull of Memphis, prayer for the divine favour and blessings is not as a rule addressed to the Apis, but to its Ka. It is a very remarkable fact that in several inscriptions[17] the god Rā is credited with no less than seven Bas and fourteen Kas, corresponding to the various qualities or attributes pertaining to his own being, and which he could communicate to the person of the king; such as: wealth, stability, majesty, glory, might, victory, creative power, etc.[18]
Thus the apprehension of the Ka, of a man’s Personality, as his Doppelgänger, or Double, found even in some of the oldest texts, acquired a far-reaching significance which extended not only to the doctrine of human immortality but also to the conception of the relations of gods to men.
As we have already stated, each man had a Ka so long as he was alive, but at his death it left him and led an independent existence. Only after long wanderings did he meet it again in the world to come, and we still possess the prayer with which he was to greet it, beginning with the words, “Hail to thee who wast my Ka during life! I come unto thee,” etc.[19]
Fig.: 5.—Set of “Canopic” Vases.[21]
Ȧmset.xxxxxDûamûtef.xxxxxHāpi.xxxxxQebhsenûf.
[21] The illustration represents the set of Canopic vases dating from the Thirtieth Dynasty, made for the priest T'et-bast-auf-ānkh, and found by Prof. Petrie at Hawara (Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoë, p. 9). They are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.