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The Shadow & the Name — Two More Parts of the Person
Keep someone's name alive and they live on; chisel it out of the stone and you attack the person themselves.
Beyond the ka, ba, and akh, Egyptians counted further parts of a person — among them the shadow and the name. The shadow (šwt) was treated as a genuine, mobile aspect of a being, offering presence and protection. The name (rn) was no mere label: to keep a person's name alive — spoken, written, inscribed on a monument — was to keep that person in existence, while to hack a name out of the stone was to attack the person themselves, a deliberate 'erasure of memory.' Preserving the name was one of the deepest Egyptian hopes for survival.
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