Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul
Good King Kuttamuwa left his soul entombed in a stone structure, so people could leave offerings and party with it. How cool is that!
"...In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts “for my soul that is in this stele..."
“...Normally, in the Semitic cultures, the soul of a person, their vital essence, adheres to the bones of the deceased,” said David Schloen, an archaeologist at the university’s Oriental Institute and director of the excavations. “But here we have a culture that believed the soul is not in the corpse but has been transferred to the mortuary stone...”
As pointed out in the article, there's similarities here to the Ancient Egyptian belief in our spiritual essence to be divided in to two halves, a soul-like personality containing 'ba', and a life-force spirit known as the 'ka'.
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