This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
E. A. Wallis Budge's translation of the Papyrus of Ani, the funerary papyrus of the scribe Ani, gives modern readers direct access to exactly the kind of ancient Egyptian text in which many of these terms first appear together, addressed to the deceased as instructions and prayers meant to guide a specific person's specific afterlife journey rather than as an abstract theological treatise written for general readers.
Reading a term like the ka or the ba inside a text like this, rather than as an isolated dictionary entry, shows how thoroughly practical the ancient Egyptian afterlife concept actually was: the papyrus assumes its reader already knows what a ka or a ba is and needs instead to know what to say and do to protect it on a specific, perilous journey, which is a very different kind of text from a modern summary written to explain the concept from scratch.
That gap between the ancient text's own assumptions and a modern reader's need for explanation is exactly what an Egyptian term entry tries to bridge, translating a concept ancient Egyptian religious practice took for granted into terms a reader coming to the material for the first time can actually follow, without flattening the concept into a single tidy modern equivalent it never quite had.