Ancient Egypt and the Making of Yorùbá Tradition

Divine potters, destiny, sacred speech, and the histories behind the parallels

A divine potter forms a human being. Yet the body alone does not explain the person who will live through it. Where does life come from? What gives this particular person a destiny? Can ritual help when that destiny seems difficult?

These questions bring ancient Egyptian and Yorùbá religious thought into a surprisingly productive conversation. The most interesting parallels concern the organization of existence: how bodies become persons, how divine power becomes effective, and how human life participates in an order larger than itself. Comparing a few names or counting water deities scarcely reaches this depth.

Could some Yorùbá concepts preserve influences from the Nile Valley? That remains historically possible, including through indirect and repeated encounters. The evidence reviewed here supports serious comparison and a connected African history. It does not establish an Egyptian origin for the whole tradition, or tell us what proportion of its theology came from Egypt. We can investigate meaningful affinities without pretending that this larger question has already been settled.

Three distinctions guide the discussion: a theological parallel compares ideas; historical plausibility identifies a possible setting for transmission; demonstrated borrowing requires evidence linking the particular ideas across that setting. These are different achievements. Each can contribute something valuable.

Diop and Lucas: reopening Africa's intellectual geography

Cheikh Anta Diop challenged histories that separated Egypt from Africa and denied Africans a substantial role in civilization. His The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, published in English in 1974, remains influential. The Metropolitan Museum's exhibition honoring this intellectual legacy placed Egyptian and other African works in conversation while explicitly acknowledging that their makers were not necessarily in contact. Comparison itself can correct a distorted historical imagination. [1]

J. Olumide Lucas pursued the more specific Egyptian–Yorùbá argument. His 1942 Durham thesis, preceding The Religion of the Yorubas in 1948, explicitly identifies Khnum as Obàtálá's Egyptian prototype. He combines the shared potter role with proposed linguistic derivations and a possible encounter near Elephantine. That is a substantive historical proposal, not a connection invented by today's internet. It also contains several separate propositions that need separate evaluation. A convincing comparison of divine craftsmanship does not automatically validate the accompanying etymologies or locate the encounter. [2, 24]

For this article, Lucas is an early comparative investigator whose questions deserve attention. Diop supplies a larger challenge to the isolation of Egyptian history from African history. Neither author should be made responsible for every later claim about Fá, pharaohs, or biblical ancestors.

Who forms the body, and who forms the head?

In the narrative sequence examined here, Obàtálá/Òrìṣà-nlá forms the body; Olódùmarè gives it life; Àjàlá fashions the heads associated with destiny. Calling either Obàtálá or Àjàlá simply “the maker of body and head” obscures this division of responsibilities. [7, 25, 26]

The key is the difference between the physical head and Orí as an inner dimension of the person. The physical head belongs to bodily formation. Àjàlá's heads in these narratives cannot be reduced to an anatomical part waiting to be attached to a headless body. The story addresses why individual lives have different possibilities and difficulties. Wande Abimbola's account distinguishes inner Orí from its bodily counterpart; Augustine Agwuele examines how narratives of destiny enter everyday reasoning about achievement. [7, 26]

Oladele Abiodun Balogun also records different accounts of choosing, receiving, or having destiny affixed before entering the world. His interpretation leaves room for effort, character, and religious action. This is a debate within the understanding of destiny, rather than a single rule that every event is immovably predetermined. [25]

These sources describe particular articulations of a diverse tradition. They should not become a universal catechism imposed on every Yorùbá community, Lucumí house, or Candomblé lineage. For a historical comparison, however, the distinction is crucial: formation, animation, and destiny are related without being identical. Our companion studies of Obàtálá, Àjàlá, and Orí explore their individual religious settings.

Khnum makes the comparison more interesting

Khnum, the ram-headed Egyptian creator associated especially with Elephantine and Esna, is portrayed as a potter. Significantly, he can fashion a person and that person's ka. The Egyptian comparison therefore extends beyond clay and bodily manufacture: it also includes the creation of an invisible dimension accompanying the individual. [27]

This gives us a more exact question than “Is Obàtálá really Khnum?” How do the two traditions distribute the work of making a person?

Comparative synthesis of [7, 25–27]. These rows identify related problems, not interchangeable doctrines.

The cluster is worth investigating: craftsmanship, embodiment, an invisible personal dimension, and divine involvement in birth. It is richer than a shared image of a pot. But it also produces a difficulty for a simple one-to-one identification. If we assign Khnum entirely to Obàtálá, where do we place Àjàlá and Olódùmarè? If we instead identify Khnum with Àjàlá, what happens to his bodily craftsmanship?

A transmission hypothesis could account for this by proposing that an inherited narrative was reorganized among different agents. That is a plausible model of cultural change, offered here as an interpretation. To turn it into history, we would need intermediate narratives showing that reorganization. The difference is therefore useful evidence to investigate, rather than an inconvenience to conceal.

Orí, ka, and shai: comparing the right questions

“Soul” is too broad a translation to do this work alone. Egyptian accounts distinguish ka, ba, akh, and other aspects of a person. In the Fitzwilliam Museum's presentation, the ba can move outside the tomb, while the akh concerns a transformed and effective postmortem existence. The ka is associated with vitality and continued sustenance. These concepts do different work. [8, 28]

For Orí's connection with destiny, Egyptian shai is an especially useful additional comparison. Paul John Frandsen discusses Egyptian texts in which a life has an allotted fate but divine assistance, protective measures, or an appeal for longer life still matter. In the Tale of the Doomed Prince, dangers are assigned at birth. In Wenamun, an appeal to Amun concerns additional years beyond an allotted lifetime. The surviving prince narrative is incomplete, so it cannot establish a final victory over fate. [29]

Comparative synthesis of [8, 9, 25–29]. Each row compares one function; no row translates an entire concept.

The theological affinity is a shared problem: how can a life have an orientation before its events unfold, while the person still has reasons to act? This is more illuminating than declaring Orí and ka equivalent. It allows us to compare a tension within religious thought, including differing answers to it.

There is also a methodological advantage. A word may correspond to several concepts in another tradition because the boundaries between concepts are drawn differently. Orí need not have one Egyptian counterpart for the comparison to be worthwhile. Indeed, insisting on a single match can prevent us from seeing the most substantial affinity.

First ground, living speech, and the work of creation

The emergence of habitable ground from water is another important comparison. Egyptian creation imagery includes the first mound and the establishment of sacred ground. In an Ilé-Ifẹ̀ narrative discussed by Andrew Apter, Odùduwà descends with earth and a bird spreads it over the watery expanse. [6, 30]

The resemblance joins cosmology to place. The land where people live is connected with a first act of ordering, and a sacred center gives that act a local address. Such a narrative can explain both how a world became habitable and why a particular place possesses religious authority. This is an interpretation of the narrative relationship, not an identification of Ilé-Ifẹ̀ with an Egyptian city.

An important difference remains in the first row: a bird spreading introduced earth is not the same narrative as a mound emerging. That distinctive action would be a useful feature to trace across other African traditions. Simply collecting accounts with water at the beginning would be much less discriminating.

The third row opens another inquiry. Creation can be imagined as a relationship between conception and realization: what is intended must become actual. That leads from creation narratives into the theology of speech and ritual.

Àṣẹ and heka: how power becomes effective

Rowland Abiodun's study of àṣẹ treats it as creative efficacy expressed through verbal and visual arts, substances, objects, and performance. It concerns the powers of beings and things, and the skilled ways those powers are activated. An attractive object alone is not necessarily effective; its relationship to the appropriate knowledge, form, and performance matters. [31]

Egyptian heka offers a substantial comparison. Egyptologist Flora Brooke Anthony describes it as a pervasive capacity used by divine and human agents, operating through words, actions, images, and objects. It belongs to religious life, including protection and healing. Translating it as “magic” can conceal this breadth if the word suggests merely an illicit exception to religion. Heka is also personified as a deity. [32]

The affinity concerns efficacy, not just belief. A spoken formula, an image, or a prepared material is understood as doing something within a connected world. This makes the comparison more precise than calling both traditions “spiritual” or referring vaguely to “energy.”

Functional comparison based on [31, 32]. The words are not proposed as linguistic cognates.

This is one of the strongest theological comparisons in the discussion because it concerns a working conception of religious action. A historical relationship is conceivable. Establishing one would require more than the general presence of powerful speech: we would look for distinctive ritual sequences, linked technical vocabulary, unusual combinations of materials, and an identifiable chain of teaching.

Òrìṣà and Egyptian deities: persons as well as principles

Can Òrìṣà be compared with Egyptian divine principles? Yes, provided that “principle” does not strip the beings of their personalities and relationships. In Abimbola's account, Ògún's iron, Òrúnmìlà's interpretive wisdom, and Èṣù's responsibilities in divine–human dealings belong to a differentiated religious world. They are not interchangeable examples of an abstract force. [26]

Egyptian deities likewise cannot be confined to a rigid chart with one function per god. The Metropolitan Museum emphasizes overlapping roles, changing manifestations, and combinations of divine identities. Horus is closely associated with kingship; other deities can share falcon imagery without becoming Horus. Thoth's association with knowledge and writing creates an intelligible point of comparison with religious wisdom elsewhere, while preserving his specific identity. [33]

Ethics supplies a further comparison. Yorùbá discussions of ìwà and ìwà pẹ̀lẹ́ connect good character with the quality of relationships and communal life. Egyptian Ma'at joins what is right with the maintenance of order. The affinity is that conduct participates in a reality larger than private preference. The difference is equally instructive: a vocabulary of cultivated character does not have the same scope as a personified order maintained through divine and royal activity. [33, 39]

Questions proposed by this article from the materials in [10, 25, 26, 33, 39]; these are not four historical identifications.

At this level, mythology and theology illuminate one another. A divine figure may embody an aspect of reality while also being approached through a name, history, shrine, and relationship. Comparing those layers offers more than matching Òrìṣà to Egyptian gods by a single shared attribute. It also respects the religious intelligence of the people who maintain the traditions.

Is Odùduwà mentioned in the Old Testament?

No identifiable Old Testament passage establishes Odùduwà as a named biblical figure. The claim examined here comes through an indirect identification: Odùduwà is linked to Lamurudu in an origin account; Lamurudu is then identified with Nimrod; Nimrod appears in Genesis. The middle step is the historical hypothesis, not something stated by the biblical text. [34–36]

This does not make the genealogy historically uninteresting. It changes what history it can securely illuminate. Jock Agai's study of Johnson shows origin narratives being interpreted through Islamic and Christian historical frameworks. Accounts referring to Mecca, Egypt, or biblical ancestry can carry the intellectual and religious circumstances of their recording as well as older memories. Johnson's preference for an Egyptian explanation also involved a Christian/Coptic context. That is not automatically an argument for migration from the Egypt of the early pharaohs. [34]

Odùduwà also operates in several registers: as a figure of creation, a dynastic ancestor, and a founder associated with movement from elsewhere. Apter distinguishes creation narratives from migration accounts and examines their political interpretation. We should not force all these registers into a single, securely dated biography. [30]

The research question becomes more interesting when stated precisely: which elements of a given origin account preserve memories of movement, and which explain or authorize the community's place in the world? A story can do both. Establishing that requires comparison among versions, knowledge of who recorded them, and evidence beyond a resemblance between two names.

Does Fá come from “FA-Rao”?

Fá is a real regional designation. The Musée des Confluences, for example, documents a Fon divination object from Abomey in the context of Fá/Ifá. That attestation establishes a regional religious name; it does not establish an Egyptian derivation. [38]

The proposed division of pharaoh into “Fa” and “Ra” fails a basic linguistic check. The Egyptian expression behind the title is conventionally written pr-ꜥꜣ, meaning great house. A term for the royal establishment became a designation of the ruler. The modern spelling “Pharao” or “pharaoh” cannot be divided arbitrarily to recover two supposed ancient religious names. In particular, its ending is not evidence that the title contains the name of the sun god Ra. [37]

Rejecting this particular derivation leaves the substantive theological comparisons intact. It also protects the investigation from an avoidable weakness: a striking resemblance in modern spelling should never have to carry an argument better served by religious texts, archaeology, and historical linguistics. Nor does failure of the proposed derivation settle the ultimate etymology of Ifá or every stage in its regional transmission.

Ifá and al-raml: a stronger formal comparison

Arabic ʿilm al-raml, the science of sand, provides a more substantial comparative case. Its geomantic procedures use sixteen figures. Ifá has sixteen principal Odù and 256 paired configurations, interpreted within an extensive corpus of verses and narratives. [14, 15]

Comparison of the sign structures described in [14, 15], not a claim that all procedures are the same.

Here the resemblance is a reproducible structure, not just a similar sound. Danfulani's comparative study explicitly places African sixteen-figure systems in relation to Arab-Islamic geomancy. The relationship is therefore a legitimate scholarly research problem. [16]

Yet a structure and its interpretation have different histories. Even if a technique traveled, the movement of that technique would not by itself explain the creation of every narrative, divine relationship, or ritual associated with Ifá. Direction and timing require early attestations, terminology, and identifiable practitioners or teaching networks. An Islamic-period connection would also be a different historical claim from descent from pharaonic religion.

Our introduction to the origins of Odù Ifá develops the broader background to this system.

Put the proposed connections on a timeline

The “old tradition” cannot be treated as a single unchanging Egypt. Political unification around 3100 BCE, later pharaonic developments, Roman and Christian Egypt, and Islamic-period networks belong to different historical settings. Likewise, the earliest inhabitants of the region now called Yorùbáland should not automatically be assigned a fully formed modern ethnic identity or a particular surviving mythology. [4, 5]

The African Humid Period provides a still earlier context. Wetter Saharan landscapes supported settlement and movement before drying reorganized possibilities across the region. This makes an African history of contact environmentally intelligible. It does not identify a migration as Yorùbá or date the transmission of a particular deity. [3]

Regional history and possible connections. Intervals are not proportional. Dates concern the indicated evidence, not the birth of an Òrìṣà or a proven Egyptian line of descent.

The timeline begins before writing becomes available for much of this history because archaeology and environmental evidence can illuminate human contexts that written sources do not. Its local sequence includes the long development of the Yorùbá–Edo region, medieval Ilé-Ifẹ̀, expanding trade, nineteenth-century wars, and modern religious encounters. [5, 19–23]

One chronological question should accompany every proposed influence: was the receiving tradition already in existence when the suggested carrier arrived? Later contact can transform an institution without having created it. The date of our earliest surviving written account also need not be the date at which a narrative began.

What could actually have carried ideas?

Trade, migration, marriage, traveling specialists, warfare, and captivity are plausible mechanisms. Their plausibility is strongest when we can specify who moved, in which direction, and during which period. Different mechanisms may account for different elements of a tradition. There is no reason to expect one founding journey to explain them all.

Archaeology provides a concrete starting point. A study of 945 glass beads from Mali, Senegal, and Ghana identifies materials originating in Egypt or the Levant and the Middle East. It demonstrates extensive medieval exchange; these sites are not themselves in Yorùbáland. At Ilé-Ifẹ̀, analysis of Igbó Olókun glass supports local primary production, principally associated with the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, within a connected regional world. Imported goods and local innovation belong in the same account. [11, 12]

Historical synthesis from [3, 11–16, 20–23]. The proposed earlier theological connections remain hypotheses.

A commodity does not carry a theology automatically. Nevertheless, trade is not religiously empty: people can transport skills, stories, ritual objects, and the relationships through which knowledge is taught. Material exchange establishes that distance was traversable. Determining what else crossed it is the next investigation.

War and enslavement require especially precise chronology. The collapse of Ọ̀yọ́ and the nineteenth-century wars displaced people and redistributed knowledge. Atlantic captivity carried practitioners into new environments. Those events are crucial to the history of transformation and diaspora; they cannot explain the first formation of institutions already present centuries earlier. [13, 22]

For an Egyptian influence hypothesis, therefore, “perhaps through slave trade and wars” is a beginning, not a completed explanation. It needs the same concrete questions as any other proposed route. Which conflict? Which captive populations? Which destination? And what evidence connects the transported knowledge to the concept being compared?

Clothing and ancestors: two different kinds of evidence

Agbádá offers a relatively concrete case of cultural adaptation. The Saint Louis Art Museum describes Yorùbá makers adapting robe forms and embroidered designs associated with Islamic northern Nigeria, working with locally valued aṣọ òkè. The Cleveland Museum also relates prestige-robe embroidery to Arabic calligraphic and protective traditions. “Influence from Arabia” is therefore too broad on its own: regional African Muslim networks and Yorùbá makers are essential parts of the story. [17, 18]

That example gives us a useful model of reception. A borrowed form can become locally meaningful through materials, skill, status, and use. Its adoption need not mean the receiving people were passive, or that the resulting garment belongs less fully to their life.

Ancestral relationships require a different evidentiary approach. Egyptian funerary provision and Yorùbá obligations to the dead both challenge the idea that death simply abolishes relationship. Agai's comparative work explores this field. But remembering ancestors is widely distributed, so the broad resemblance alone has limited power to identify a historical source. [8, 9]

The stronger questions concern specific practices: who becomes an ancestor, who maintains the relationship, which offerings or objects matter, and how this relates to family and political authority. A household's remembrance, an Egúngún institution, and Egyptian funerary transformation should not be treated as one identical practice. The companion article on ancestral presence approaches these distinctions from a Brazilian heritage setting.

Which parallels deserve the most attention?

The following is this article's assessment of comparative usefulness, not a numerical probability of Egyptian origin.

A good next study would take one of the strongest clusters and compare several African regions, rather than moving directly from Egypt to Yorùbáland. It would ask whether intermediate communities preserve related combinations, what can be dated, and whether linguistic, ritual, and material evidence converge. It would also test independent development and shared older backgrounds. These alternatives matter because the historical answer may differ from one concept to another.

For now, the most defensible picture is of a deeply creative Yorùbá tradition formed within a connected African world. Egyptian parallels deserve a place in that inquiry, especially where they reveal a sophisticated architecture of personhood, destiny, and effective religious action. What remains open is the history connecting the systems, not whether their comparison can be intellectually fruitful.

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Sources and further reading

The numbered references distinguish ancient texts, scholarly interpretations, and material evidence. Comparative judgments in the tables are this article’s synthesis. A recorded tradition is evidence that an account exists; its historical identifications require separate evaluation.

[1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, The African Origin of Civilization. Exhibition and interpretive framework; Diop's 1974 book is the historical starting point.

[2] J. Olumide Lucas, The Religion of the Yorubas (1948), AfricaMuseum catalog record. Historical comparative source; individual derivations are not endorsed wholesale.

[3] African Humid Period research and regional transition study. Environmental context, not ethnic genealogy.

[4] Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Early Dynastic Period; Metropolitan Museum, Roman Egypt.

[5] Aribidesi Usman and Toyin Falola, The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2019.

[6] University College London, Gods and goddesses in ancient Egypt: creation.

[7] Augustine Agwuele, Exertion is not connected to success, Africa 91(5), 2021, 810–831. Narrative and conceptual context; no specific Odù attribution is made in this article.

[8] Fitzwilliam Museum, The soul in ancient Egypt.

[9] Joel A. Agai, An investigation into the ancient Egyptian cultural influences on the Yorubas of Nigeria, 2013. Used for the debate and its acknowledged evidentiary limits, not as validation of every historical or anthropological claim in that paper.

[10] Metropolitan Museum, Horse head from Ifẹ̀. Medieval date and local artistic context.

[11] Archaeological Glass Beads as Evidence of Exchange Dynamics in West Africa, African Archaeological Review, 2025.

[12] Babalola, McIntosh, Dussubieux and Rehren, Ile-Ife and Igbo Olokun in the history of glass in West Africa, 2017; Babalola and colleagues, Chemical analysis of glass beads from Igbo Olokun, 2018.

[13] Usman and Falola, The nineteenth century: the internecine wars and consequences, 2019.

[14] National Library of Medicine, Astrology, divination and magic; British Museum, Divination equipment.

[15] UNESCO, Ifa divination system.

[16] Umar H. D. Danfulani, Sixteen Figure Divination in Africa: Its Regional Spread and Relationship with Arab-Islamic Geomancy, Africana Marburgensia 30(1), 1997, 24–45; bibliographic record and abstract. Full paper not used for specific procedural claims.

[17] Saint Louis Art Museum, Aso Oke: Prestige Cloth from Nigeria.

[18] Cleveland Museum of Art, Prestige robe.

[19] Akinwumi Ogundiran, Chronology, Material Culture, and Pathways to the Cultural History of Yoruba-Edo Region, 500 B.C.–A.D. 1800. Regional chronological framework for the timeline; not a date for religious origins.

[20] Metropolitan Museum, The Trans-Saharan Gold Trade, seventh–fourteenth century.

[21] Usman and Falola, The eighteenth century, on the earlier shift toward Atlantic commerce.

[22] The Slave Ship Manuelita and the Story of a Yoruba Community, 1833–1834, a specific study linking war, captivity and the Atlantic crossing.

[23] J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Change in Yorubaland. Historical framework for religious encounters; the timeline does not assign a single origin date to the agbádá.

[24] J. Olumide Lucas, The Religion of the Yorubas, Especially in Relation to the Religion of Ancient Egypt, Durham thesis, 1942, chapter V, especially pp. 102–105. Accessible thesis transcription, identifying the Durham original. The passages on Obàtálá and Khnum were consulted; this is the thesis, not a claim to have checked every passage of the 1948 book.

[25] Oladele Abiodun Balogun, The Concepts of Ori and Human Destiny in Traditional Yoruba Thought: A Soft-Deterministic Interpretation, Nordic Journal of African Studies 16(1), 2007, 116–130, especially 121–125. An explicit philosophical interpretation, not a declaration of universal agreement among practitioners.

[26] Wande Abimbola, The Yoruba Concept of Human Personality, consulted in Luiz L. Marins's 2011 Portuguese translation. The translation identifies a 1971 conference presentation and a 1981 CNRS edition. Its translator's comments are distinguished from Abimbola's text; relevant passages are on PDF pages 3 and 5–7. Abimbola identifies a particular Nigerian, especially Ọ̀yọ́, research context.

[27] Global Egyptian Museum, Khnum. The divine potter and the making of the person and ka.

[28] Global Egyptian Museum, Ka. Vitality and the ka's continuing relationship with provision after death.

[29] Paul John Frandsen, “Aspects of Kingship in Ancient Egypt,” in Nicole Brisch, ed., Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, Oriental Institute Seminars 4, 2008. Publisher and open volume, especially printed pp. 53–55 on fate, lifespan, and divine intervention.

[30] Andrew Apter, Frobenius Unbound: Black Atlantis and the Poetics of Displacement in the Yoruba Diaspora, Paideuma 68, 2022, 119–148, especially 133–135. Creation, migration, and political interpretations of origin narratives.

[31] Rowland Abiodun, “Àṣẹ: Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art,” Journal of Religion in Africa 24(4), 1994, 309–322. Consulted in the Portuguese teaching translation by wanderson flor do nascimento, especially PDF pages 1–3. English prose here is a paraphrase, not a quotation reconstructed from the translation.

[32] Flora Brooke Anthony, Ḥeka: Understanding Egyptian Magic on Its Own Terms, 2017. An Egyptologist's discussion of the concept and its operation through words, objects, and ritual action.

[33] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Divine Egypt: Inside the Exhibition. Divine identities, overlapping roles, kingship, and Ma'at.

[34] Jock Agai, Samuel Johnson's View about Oduduwa in Connection with the Origins of the Yoruba, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 76(4), 2020, a6013. DOI: 10.4102/hts.v76i4.6013. Used for the historiography of the origin claims, not as proof of an Egyptian migration.

[35] Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas, 1921, opening chapter on origins; Cambridge excerpt. The Lamurudu–Odùduwà relationship is reported as part of an origin account, not independently established genealogy.

[36] Genesis 10:6–12, New American Bible, USCCB. The actual biblical genealogy and geography relevant to the Nimrod claim.

[37] Global Egyptian Museum, Pharaoh. The Egyptian expression meaning “great house” and its use for the ruler.

[38] Musée des Confluences, Fon Fá divination object, Abomey, inventory 2019.31.1. Regional naming and collection documentation; not a source for an ultimate etymology.

[39] Oyebade Oyewole and Azenabor Godwin, A Discourse on the Fundamental Principles of Character in an African Moral Philosophy, African Journal of History and Culture, 2018. DOI: 10.5897/AJHC2018.0405. Used for the relationship between character, conduct, and communal life.