Did the ancient Egyptians believe in reincarnation?

Not as far as their own writings show. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Egyptians were the first to teach that the soul passes through the bodies of animals and then returns to a human body, but Egyptologists find no Egyptian text that teaches this. Egypt’s own texts describe a life after death in the next world, where spells let the dead take forms such as a falcon, a lotus or a swallow, at will: a change of form, not rebirth into a new life on earth.

What Herodotus wrote: In his Histories, written in the fifth century BCE, Herodotus says the Egyptians were the first to hold that the soul is immortal. In his account, when the body dies the soul enters a creature being born; after passing through every creature of land, sea and air, it enters a human body again, a round of three thousand years. Some Greeks, he adds, earlier and later, took up the teaching as their own. He is often thought to mean Pythagoras and, later, Empedocles.
Life after death in Egypt: From the Pyramid Texts to the Book of the Dead, Egyptian texts look forward to life in the next world, not a second life on earth. The dead hoped to pass the judgment and live on as themselves among the gods, fed by offerings at the tomb. The transformation spells of the Book of the Dead let them take the form of a falcon, a lotus, a swallow, a snake or a crocodile, or any form they wished: changes made after death, at will, not a new birth. The ba, shown as a bird with a human head, could leave the tomb by day and return to the body at night.
How Gerald Massey read it in 1907: Massey argues that Egypt did not teach the rebirth of a human soul in an animal. In Book III he argues that the idea of souls passing from creature to creature began with souls that were not human: the powers of nature, and the totem, a clan’s animal, whose soul people and animals were held to share. He does speak of an Egyptian metempsychosis, the soul passing through shape after shape, but he sets it after death, in the world below (his Amenta), where, he writes, the human figure “is never lost to view”. Greece and India, in his reading, later misread it as the human soul passing through animal bodies.
What scholars say now: Egyptologists agree that the Egyptian texts teach no rebirth on earth, in an animal or in a new human body. Many think Herodotus misunderstood the transformation spells, or gave Egypt the credit for a Greek idea, as Greek writers often traced their wisdom to Egypt. On the main point, then, Massey reaches a similar answer by another road. His scheme of totem souls, and of stages that every religion passed through, belongs to the anthropology of his day and is not accepted, and historians do not trace the Greek or Indian teachings of rebirth to Egypt.
In Massey’s words: “There was no ground for thinking that the human soul would be reincorporated or reincarnated in the body of the beast or reptile” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book III, p. 141)
In the app: Trainer › Symbol Trainer › Ba. In the app, the Symbol Trainer explains the ba, the human-headed bird that leaves the tomb by day, and Book III gives Massey’s case on transmigration, with a plain-words note under every part.

Last updated November 2, 2026.

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