Altes Reich
From the third-millennium Old Kingdom of Egypt, belief in an eternal afterlife of the human ka is documented along with the notion that the actions of a person would be assessed to determine the quality of that existence. A claim of dominance of humanity alongside radical pessimism because of the frailty and brevity of human life is asserted in the Hebrew Bible Genesis 1:28, where dominion of humans is promised, but contrarily, the author of Ecclesiastes, bewails the vanity of all human effort.