The Kuttamuwa stele is an 800-pound (360 kg) basalt funerary stele with an Aramaic inscription referring to Kuttamuwa, an 8th-century BCE royal official.

It was found in Sam'al, in southeastern Turkey, in 2008, by the Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

The inscription requested that his mourners commemorate his life and his afterlife with feasts "for my soul that is in this stele."

It is one of the earliest references in a Near East culture to a soul as a separate entity from the body.

He is also to perform the slaughter (prescribed above) in (proximity to) my “soul” and is to apportion for me a leg-cut.