The Last Flight of the Ba: Reimagining the Afterlife at the End of Antiquity

by Mary Harrsch © 2026 

This Nubian ba-bird statue (Ballana Cemetery B, Tomb 245; ca. 225–300 CE) that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago belongs to the final phase of a mortuary concept whose origins lie more than two thousand years earlier in ancient Egypt. My research revealed its presence in Nubia—and its sudden disappearance shortly thereafter—offers a striking case study in cultural transmission, adaptation, and rupture.

Sandstone Ba-bird statue from Ballana Cemetery B, tomb 245, Meroitic Phase IIIB-IV (225-300 CE) photographed at the Institute of the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago by Mary Harrsch

The ba first emerges in the Old Kingdom (3rd millennium BCE) as one component of the Egyptian conception of personhood. Initially textual and closely associated with royal and divine vitality, the ba represented mobility, individuality, and the capacity to move between the worlds of the living and the dead. By the Middle Kingdom, it acquired its canonical iconographic form as a human-headed bird, a visualization that stabilized during the New Kingdom and became ubiquitous in funerary papyri and tomb decoration. In this context, the ba was shown leaving the tomb by day and returning to reunite with the body, underscoring the continued importance of corporeal preservation.

From the Late Period onward, Egyptian theology increasingly treated the ba as part of a more integrated and abstract soul concept. In Roman-period Egypt, the ba did not disappear, but its visual prominence declined. While it continued to appear in hieroglyphic and Demotic texts, temple reliefs, and small-scale funerary objects such as amulets and shrouds, it was often absent from the dominant imagery of Roman-style coffins and mummy portraits, which emphasized individual likeness and social identity over explicit depictions of afterlife mechanics. The ba remained theologically intact, but visually implicit rather than central.

In Nubia, however, the trajectory diverged. Egyptian mortuary concepts had been selectively adopted since the New Kingdom and Napatan periods, but during the Meroitic and post-Meroitic phases they were reworked within a distinctly Nubian elite ideology. In cemeteries such as Ballana and Qustul (ca. 250–350 CE), the ba was not merely depicted but fully materialized as a three-dimensional stone statue placed within monumental tumulus tombs. These sculptures likely functioned as permanent anchors for the deceased’s spiritual essence, particularly in a funerary tradition that did not replicate Egyptian mummification practices in full. At precisely the moment when Roman Egypt was reducing the visual role of the ba, Nubia was giving it one of its most emphatic and sculptural expressions.

This tradition ended abruptly. By the mid–4th century CE, with the collapse of Meroitic political structures and a rapid transformation in burial customs, ba statues disappear entirely from the Nubian archaeological record. There is no evidence for their survival or reinterpretation in later X-Group, Makurian, or Christian Nubian contexts. Unlike in Egypt, where the ba was absorbed into evolving religious frameworks, in Nubia the concept appears to have been abandoned wholesale once the elite ideology that sustained it collapsed.

The Ballana ba-bird thus represents not a late survival of an Egyptian idea, but the closing chapter of a long and complex history: a concept born in Old Kingdom theology, reshaped through centuries of Egyptian religious thought, monumentalized in Nubia, and then brought to an abrupt end in the political and religious realignments of Late Antiquity.

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