It is even possible that the very word _Ka_ had originally a connection with a root signifying "to live." At any rate, it was identical in spelling with a word which denoted "food"; and that the pronunciation of the two words was the same, may be gathered from the fact that the Egyptian bas-reliefs sometimes represent the offerings of food made to the dead or to the gods inside the arms of the symbol of the Ka(23). When we remember that _vivande_ is nothing more than the Latin _vivenda_, "the things on which we live," there arises at least the possibility of an etymological connection between the double and the principle of life which it once symbolised.(24)
Now, in my Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, I pointed out that the early Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia held a belief which is almost precisely the same as that of the Egyptians in regard to the Ka. In Babylonia also, everything had its Zi or "double," and the nature of this Zi is in no way distinguishable from that of the Egyptian Ka. As in Egypt, moreover, the gods had each his Zi as well as men and things, and, as in Egypt, it was the Zi of the god rather than the god himself which was primarily worshipped. So marked is the resemblance between the two conceptions, that in working it out on the Babylonian side, I could not resist the conviction that there must have been some connection between them. That was sixteen years ago. Since then discoveries have been made and facts brought to light which indicate that a connection really did exist between the Babylonia and the Egypt of the so-called prehistoric age, and have led me to believe, with Hommel, de Morgan, and others, that Babylonia was the home and cradle of the Pharaonic Egyptians. In Sumerian the word Zi signified "life," and was denoted by the picture of a flowering reed. It was the life on which was imprinted the form of the body that was for a time its home, and its separation from the body meant the death of the latter. The Sumerians never advanced to the further stage of making the vital principle itself a separable quality; perhaps the original signification of the word which it never lost would have prevented this. But they did go on to transform the Zi into a spirit or demon, who, in place of being the counterpart of some individual person or thing, could enter at will into any object he chose. Even in Egypt, traces of the same logical progress in ideas may perhaps be found. If Professor Maspero is right in his interpretation of certain passages in the Pyramid texts and Ptolemaic papyri, "The double did not allow its family to forget it, but used all the means at its disposal to remind them of its existence. It entered their houses and their bodies, terrified them, waking and sleeping, by its sudden apparitions, struck them down with disease or madness, and would even suck their blood like the modern vampire(25)." Such a conception of the Ka, however, if ever it existed, must have soon passed away, leaving behind it but few vestiges of itself.