Egyptian religious texts describe every person as accompanied through life by a ka, a vital double created at birth, sometimes said to be shaped on a potter's wheel by the god Khnum alongside the physical body itself. In life the ka is inseparable from the person it animates; death is described as "going to one's ka," a phrase treating the ka not as something acquired at the moment of death but as something the deceased rejoins, having been briefly parted from it by dying.
What makes the ka distinctive among the world's multiple-soul concepts is how directly its survival depends on the living. Egyptian funerary religion is built substantially around keeping the ka fed: tomb chapels were provisioned with offerings of bread, beer, meat and drink, either real or, when resources ran short, depicted in relief and recited as a spoken formula understood to sustain the ka by the power of the words alone. Professional ka-priests, hem-ka, were retained by wealthy families specifically to keep this cult running after the family itself could no longer attend, a role that in some cases was endowed to continue for generations.
The tomb itself could be called the ka's house, per-ka, underlining that the whole architecture of Egyptian funerary practice, offering chapels, false doors through which the ka was thought to pass to receive its food, statues built to serve as an alternative resting place should the mummy itself be destroyed, exists substantially to give the ka somewhere to live and something to live on.