The Human Soul: An Ancient Idea
A friend recently told me that he had finally, in middle age, found his soul mate. She was a woman he barely knew, but he was willing to give up everything to be in her sphere. With glassy eyes, he described how they were special, destined to find each other, and that in coming together they made each other whole.
It was hard to not laugh at my friend's pronouncement of wandering souls crashing together, because most adults are long past that ephemeral kind of love and way into the hard reality of day-to-day living with someone, no matter the condition of their soul.
But my friend would be heartened by the discovery by archaeologists from the Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago of a stone slab with an inscription that confirms that people like him have been into the idea of a soul for a very long time.
The slab, or stele, was recovered from an Iron Age city called Sam'al in Turkey. It dates to around the 8th century B.C. On the 800-pound, three-foot-tall piece of rock was an incised picture of a man, the deceased, who was presumably cremated, and words that explained that the soul of this man now resided within the stone slab.
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It was hard to not laugh at my friend's pronouncement of wandering souls crashing together, because most adults are long past that ephemeral kind of love and way into the hard reality of day-to-day living with someone, no matter the condition of their soul.
But my friend would be heartened by the discovery by archaeologists from the Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago of a stone slab with an inscription that confirms that people like him have been into the idea of a soul for a very long time.
The slab, or stele, was recovered from an Iron Age city called Sam'al in Turkey. It dates to around the 8th century B.C. On the 800-pound, three-foot-tall piece of rock was an incised picture of a man, the deceased, who was presumably cremated, and words that explained that the soul of this man now resided within the stone slab.