The Afterlife in Ancient Egypt
Skocilic, Jasmina (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Expanding Horizons: Travel and Exchanging Ideas through the Ages, Journal of the XIIIth annual ISHA conference (Nijmegen, 2002)
Abstract
Western man places religion in a compartment of its own, separating it from other aspects of his existence. To an Egyptian this would have been unthinkable. Religion permeated his whole life socially, politically and economically. As he saw it, every detail of his own life and of the life around him, from the predictable flooding of the Nile 
to the chance death of a cat depended entirely on the attitude of the gods. The worship of animals and nature is common to early societies, when man is dominated by the world around him and exists at its mercy. As he grows in sophistication, as he learns to come to grips with nature, as he awe of its mysteries diminishes and his appreciation of his own talents awakens, then his gods undergo a transmission from zoomorphic to anthromorphic concepts. So it was with Egyptians.
Sometime before the rise of the First Dynasty, anthropomorphism, the conception of gods in human form, made its appearance in Egyptian religion.
Their beliefs concerning afterlife, like those concerning their gods, had ancient roots in the Nile Valley. Tombs of the Neolithic Age reveal tools and food left with the dead, objects that could only have been intended for use by the departed.
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