Quote:As regards the idea of soul there is evidence that it appeared at about 2400 BCE.
I wonder if this does not simply reflect the growing aggrandizement of the monarchy? You know the old Monty Python routine in Holy Grail? One guy says "He must be a king or something." The other says "How do you know that?" The first guy answers "He ain't got shit all over him."
It's a long way from that to the "L'etat c'est moi" style of king.
More to the point, though, I seem to recall that the earliest attribution of a real afterlife was only to the pharaoh who became one of the stars. Everyone else was relegated to some sort of holding tank similar to the Greek Hades. One can easily see the idea expanding as the nobility and the priests got a little more full of themselves, though. My point, I guess, is that it is not a static concept. It evolved....much as all religions evolve... but Egypt did so over a very long period of time. The best you can probably do is take a snapshot of what they believed in any given era and look for ancestors and descendants of that belief.
