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Ancient Egypt provides our clearest evidence for afterlife beliefs and practices. This evidence includes burial texts from royal tombs, afterlife instructions written on coffins, and books about the netherworld that explains how the soul or spirit of the deceased can arrive safely in the next world. Bodies were preserved, and provisions of food and other items were supplied for the dead, which shows that a general sense of continuity was felt between this life and the next. Conceptions of the afterlife could be positive—for example, sailing across the sky with the sun god or traveling to the Field of Offerings, which came to be viewed as a kind of Paradise. Nevertheless, the journey to the netherworld could be perilous. The deceased needed to know the proper spells and the names of underworld beings and objects to reach their final destination. Certain texts, such as the Instruction of Merikare and the Book of the Dead, suggest that one's moral deeds on earth help determine one’s fate in the afterlife. Egyptian beliefs about death and the hereafter obviously were not uniform everywhere or in every period, but these basic concepts remained current in Egypt throughout the Old Testament era.

Belief in the survival of the soul after the body’s death is well attested in Mesopotamian sources. Provisions were placed in graves to nourish the deceased for their journey to the netherworld. Regular offerings were required to sustain the souls of the departed, since food does not grow in the region of the dead. In general, the netherworld was seen as a dark, gloomy place below the earth’s surface where people eat dust and clay and where a road leads in but there is no way out. Proper burial and mourning rites, along with regular offerings, needed to be performed by the living on behalf of the dead to improve their condition. Thus, according to one mythological text, the deceased person who receives no food offerings from surviving relatives must eat scraps, whereas the person who is survived by six sons rejoices, and the one who has seven sons sits among the lesser gods. With proper care from the living, souls in the netherworld become part of the family’s ancestral spirits until eventually the remnant of a person’s soul is recycled in a newly born human.

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