May the force be with you: Soul of Egypt (3)

Letter to the Dead, The Trustees of the British Museum

The ancient Egyptians also believed that there was a ghost because they thought that a mischievous or hammered "ba" could come out of a tomb and walk around the human world, causing harm to people. The Egyptians believed that if a house was affected by rain or illness, the dead were causing damage. So the Egyptians tried to calm their anger by performing ancestral rites or writing letters to console the resentment of the dead. Many related Papyrus letters were found, which scholars named "Letters to the Dead". The interesting fact is that he also used this ability of "Ba" to hold a memorial service to pray for harm to his enemies or haters.

Turin fragment of the story. Museo Egizio, S.6619

Also, Egyptians loved stories about ghosts. Among the stories they left behind are stories of the same form as traditional fairy tales. One of them, < Khonsuemheb and the ghost>, is a ghost story written during the Middle Kingdom and tells the story of ghosts and living people meeting in person to solve problems.
Khonsuemheb, a priest of Amun Temple, meets a wandering soul called Nebusemekh as he goes on the road. Nebusemekh reveals that no one cares for his tomb, so it is forgotten and ruined and wandering forlornly. And he grieves that he has told this to many living people, but has not listened to him. However, it is said that Khonsuemheb volunteered for help and found Nebusemekh 's tomb and repaired it to console his soul. Through this " Khonsuemheb and the Ghost," we can find that the afterlife imagined and expected by ancient Egyptians was not much different from ours.
In ancient Egypt, it was believed that death was not the end of life, but the beginning of a new world with new forms of energy. The pyramids, temples and tombs that we know also reflect the beliefs of these ancient people. However, the ancient Egyptians believed that the soul had to go through several stages under conditions that were met so that it could become a completed soul and go to another afterlife where the gods lived.

But the first prerequisite was the preservation of the body. This is because it was believed that only then would spirits such as 'ka' and 'ba' wake up and prepare to go to heaven. However, if the spirits in the body are not properly activated after death, they cannot become the completed soul, "Akh," and miss the opportunity to go to the world of the gods.