In some passages of his work De Iside et Osiride, Plutarch deals with the issue of the Egyptian notion of soul and its manifestations. in all cases, Plutarch uses the Greek term ψυχή to make reference to the “soul” in which, according to him, ancient Egyptians believed. As a result, Plutarch presupposes the existence of an anthropological dualism – similar to the Greek one – in the Egyptian ontological thought. However, in ancient Egyptian mind-set, a concept similar to the western notion of soul never existed: only from the coptic period onwards, with the introduction of the Greek term ψυχή as a loanword to make allusion to the christian notion of soul, it is possible to consider that the anthropological conception was dualist in Egypt as it is described in Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride
