Are Animals Connected to Souls?
Exhibit showcases power of animals in ancient Nubia
Ba-statue from ancient Nubia (225–300 CE). Courtesy Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures.
A Bestiary of Ancient Nubia
Through August 16, 2026
Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum
Chicago, Illinois
isac.uchicago.edu
Why do people feel so connected to animals? From perceived “spirit animals” to beloved pets, animals enrich human life in a way that is difficult to overstate. They provide companionship, love, and service, and feel like a deep part of who we are.
In ancient Nubia (“Cush”), as in neighboring ancient Egypt, this connection extended beyond life. Animals shaped not only the Nubian economy and Nubian art, but also ideas of the soul—where a person could be conceived, quite literally, in animal form. The exhibition A Bestiary of Ancient Nubia, on display at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), explores how animals structured multiple facets of Nubian society: its economy, its artistic expression, and its religious beliefs.
Situated in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan, ancient Nubia is often overshadowed by Egypt in scholarship and the popular imagination. The exhibition highlights ancient Nubia as a distinct and active contributor within a shared Nile Valley system, spanning a long chronological range, from 3800 BCE to 900 CE.
Known in ancient Egyptian texts—a key but outsider source of information on Nubia—as the “Land of the Bow,” Nubia was renowned for its archers. This reputation is often framed in terms of warfare. While archaeological evidence suggests that domesticated herds became increasingly central over time, with cattle raised and exported to Egypt and West Asia, the region’s riverine and savannah environments provided ready access to wild animals, which were hunted. Egyptian records consistently describe Cush as a source of wealth, particularly in animal products and other luxury goods.
Facsimile of Nubians with a giraffe and a monkey (c. 1504–1425 BCE). Courtesy Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures.
Ancient animals, however, were not only economic resources. As the exhibition emphasizes, ancient animals appear as companions, diplomatic gifts, and divine or mythical beings. They moved fluidly between practical and symbolic roles.
This fusion is particularly visible in funerary beliefs shared across the Nile Valley, including the concept of the ba. The ba is a component of the soul in ancient Egyptian and Nubian belief. Unlike the physical body, it could move and act independently from its human body. It is most commonly represented as a bird with a human head.
The ba-bird was believed to have a highly active role after death, leaving the tomb during the day to travel through the realm of the living, at times associated with the solar journey of the sun god across the sky. At night, the ba-bird returns to the tomb and reunites with the body. This cycle maintains a continuous relationship between the living world and the afterlife, with the ba moving between them much like a messenger.
Birds, long observed to reliably travel across distances and return, provided a natural model for imagining movement between worlds. In this system, the components of the self were separable but ultimately required reunification. When the ba returned to the body at night, it restored the unity of the person, allowing the deceased to remain a complete and enduring being.
The ba-bird appears across a wide range of media: tomb paintings, funerary papyri, amulets, coffins, and burial goods. It is often shown hovering above the deceased or perched near the tomb. This idea is elaborated in funerary texts such as the Book of the Dead, which includes spells for “causing the ba to return to the body” and “not letting the ba be trapped.” Although composed in Egypt, these beliefs were integrated into Nubian religious life, especially during the Cushite period, when Nubian rulers adopted Egyptian religious systems and ruled Egypt as pharaohs in the 25th Dynasty (747–656 BCE).
To take pause and consider the implications of the evidence: In ancient Nubia and Egypt, it was not just humans but also animals that were understood to continue existing after death. No longer confined to the natural world, their forms were conjoined. Hybridity between ancient animals and humans seems to have provided a framework to understand the afterlife. As boundaries between human and animal identity blurred, bird flight offered a powerful model for articulating something foundational about the human soul—its capacity for movement, separation, and return.
Figures such as the ba-bird suggest that animals, humans, and the soul were thought to be existentially continuous. That continuity was there in life but flowered in death, giving way to transformation. The ba-bird is a key example, then, that ancient animals functioned as a medium through which abstract spiritual concepts were explored.
What is gained in our knowledge about ancient Nubia by a focus on animals? There, as elsewhere, animals were not background elements in human history. They shaped ancient Nubia’s economy, enhanced its political power, and helped its religious imagination take flight.
Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.
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