Ma'at

Maat is at once a goddess and the central concept of Egyptian thought: truth, justice, balance and the right order of the cosmos, set against isfet, chaos and disorder. Shown as a woman wearing a single ostrich feather, she is less an object of large temple cult than the principle every temple served, for the daily rituals were understood as maintaining maat and holding chaos at bay. The pharaoh's entire legitimacy rested on his presenting maat to the gods and upholding it in the land: a common temple scene shows the king offering a small figure of the goddess, a statement that he governs justly. To do maat and speak maat was the Egyptian summary of a good life.

The strength of Maat's concept in Egyptian kingship shows clearly in royal naming: pharaohs frequently built her name directly into their own throne names, among them Hatshepsut, whose throne name Maatkare, Truth is the Soul of Ra, publicly bound her legitimacy as ruler to the goddess from the moment of her coronation. The feather that is Maat's emblem also functioned in hieroglyphic writing itself as the sign used to write concepts of rightness, straightness and truth more broadly, so that the abstract principle she personified was built into the Egyptian language's own visual vocabulary for over three thousand years of continuous use.

Maat's most famous role is in the judgment of the dead. In the vignette that accompanies the Book of the Dead, the heart of the deceased is placed on one pan of a great balance and Maat's feather on the other; only a heart light with a life lived in accordance with maat, confirmed by the deceased's recitation of the Negative Confession, the declaration of wrongs not done, passes the test, while the heavy heart is devoured by the monster Ammit and the person perishes utterly. The scene turned an abstract ethical order into an image of startling directness, and it is one of the most reproduced of all Egyptian religious pictures. The vizier who administered justice bore the title priest of Maat, tying the courts of the living to the balance of the dead.

The fullest surviving version of the judgement scene comes from Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead, preserved in especially rich illustrated form in the Papyrus of Ani, a nineteenth-dynasty manuscript now in the British Museum, in which the deceased addresses forty-two divine assessors by name, denying a specific wrong before each one in turn, from theft and murder to more mundane offences such as talking too much or fouling running water, before the heart is placed on the scale against Maat's feather while the jackal-headed Anubis supervises the weighing and Thoth stands ready to record the result.