Maat

What it is

Maat is at once an idea and a figure in ancient Egyptian religion. As an idea it names truth, balance, law, morality and justice. As a figure it is a goddess, drawn as a young woman, sometimes with a wing on each arm and an ostrich feather on her head. She is said to have set the stars and the seasons and to govern what people and gods do. Her opposite is Isfet, a word for chaos, injustice, violence and wrong doing. The order she stands for is held to have been fixed at creation, and keeping it there was a task shared by the king and by ordinary people.

Where it comes from

The oldest substantial records of Maat come from the Old Kingdom, chiefly the Pyramid Texts of Unas, dated around 2375 and 2345 BCE. Pictures of her as a goddess begin in the middle of the Old Kingdom, roughly 2680 to 2190 BCE. In Egyptian accounts of creation, Ra is said to have emerged only once she had been put in the place of chaos. From the Eighteenth Dynasty, about 1550 to 1295 BC, she was called a daughter of Ra, which let kings claim they ruled by her warrant. Accounts differ over her partner: Thoth often stands as her male counterpart because their qualities overlap, while other versions pair Thoth with Seshat and make Shu her brother.

How it is done

The best known setting for Maat is the judgement of the dead, the Weighing of the Heart, which takes place in the Duat, the Egyptian realm of the dead. A person's heart is set against her feather, and the balance is believed to decide whether that soul reaches the paradise of the afterlife. In daily life the working of Maat was a matter of conduct rather than a spell: public and ritual life, correctly carried out, was held to keep the world in order, and the king was charged with holding her in place. Judges in later periods wore her image while hearing cases.

Tools and materials

Her sign is the ostrich feather, worn on her head and used as the weight in the judgement of the dead. She is also linked with the balance that holds feather and heart, and with scales more generally. Nobody is sure what the feather meant to the Egyptians; the god Shu, in some stories her brother, wears the same emblem. Kings were shown with her symbols to make plain their duty of upholding law and right conduct, and from later periods judges carried pictures of her.

What it is for

Maat was the standard against which daily conduct was measured. People were expected to deal honestly with family, community, the state, the land and the gods. The concept served the needs of a growing Egyptian state made up of peoples with different interests, and it became the ground of Egyptian law, holding disorder back. It also asked something of the powerful: the rich were urged to help those with less, a duty echoed in tomb inscriptions about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and caring for widows and orphans. In the afterlife it decided who reached paradise.

Who does it

Priests were the ritual specialists, and from the Fifth Dynasty, around 2510 to 2370 BCE, the vizier who oversaw justice bore the title Priest of Maat. Judges at later dates wore her image. Much of the everyday work of Maat fell to the sesh, a word for scribes, bureaucrats and educated men who drafted, read and kept records. Scribal schools began in the Middle Kingdom, around 2060 to 1700 BCE, and their teachers were priests. Pupils were picked by date of birth, most of them boys though some privileged girls attended; they could board or live at home, and learned sacred writing alongside practical arithmetic.

Peoples and places

Maat belongs to ancient Egypt, and no single cult centre is given for her: all Egyptian cities are named instead. The principle is described as a response to a state that drew together peoples of differing interests. Scribes wrote and read letters aloud for people who could not read, so the idea reached past the literate elite, and complaints from the poor were carried upward through them. Through the Greek period Egyptian law ran beside Greek law, and Egyptian practice let women act on their own and hold substantial property, which in time affected the tighter customs of the Greeks and Romans.

What people believe

Behind Maat lies a conviction that the world holds together as one holy order. Correct public and ritual life is held to keep that harmony, and any break in it is thought to reach both the individual and the state: an impious king could be blamed for famine, and blasphemy was said to bring blindness. Isfet, meaning chaos, lies and violence, is the opposing force. The creator is quoted in a Middle Kingdom text, from roughly 2062 to 1664 BCE, saying he made every person like his fellow. Maat was thought to join the cosmos, the living world, the kingdom and the single person into one whole.

Compare and confuse

Maat is most often set against Isfet, its named opposite, a word covering injustice, chaos, violence and evil doing. The Coptic descendants of the Egyptian word, ⲙⲉⲉ and ⲙⲉ, carry the sense of truth and justice. Thoth, god of writing and reckoning, shares several of her qualities and appears as her male partner in some accounts, while in others he is paired with Seshat and Maat is linked to Shu as a sibling.

Law and persecution

Maat was applied as a spirit rather than a written code, and little survives describing how Egyptian courts actually worked. From the Fifth Dynasty the chief judge, the vizier, held the title Priest of Maat, and later judges wore her picture. Wisdom texts known as Sebayt offered case by case advice on settling disputes in her spirit, so few general rules can be drawn from them. Under Greek rule two legal systems ran side by side; the Egyptian one let women own property and act alone, and it later shaped Greek and Roman practice. Roman control replaced this with the empire's own law.

Questions people ask about Maat

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle
• The Negative ConfessionWorld History Encyclopedia, Article

• Maat on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data