Maat

Mythology of Maat

Picture: This gilded silver image of an unknown king presenting theimage of Maat represents the classic ritual of royalresponsibility and adherence to order, justice and truth.19th Dynasty. Louvre, Paris.

The goddess Maat personified the concepts of truth, justice and comsic order (Egyptian maat). Show is known to have existed at least from the Old Kingdom and is mentioned in the Pyramid Texts where she is said to stand behind the sun god Ra (PT 1582, passim), though it is not until the New Kingdom that we have evidence of her being called the 'daughter of Ra'. The goddess was also associated with Osiris - who is said to be 'lord of maat' at an early date - and in later times she was subsumed to some extent by Isis, although according to ancient Egyptian mythology the husband of Maat was usually said to be the scribal god Thoth. As the daughter of Ra Maat was also the sister of the reigning king who was the 'son of Ra', and the relationship of the goddess with the king was a vital one. Both the monarch's legitimation and the efficacy of his reign were ultimately based upon the degree to which he upheld maat and it was common therefore for kings to style themselves 'beloved of Maat'. Her role was multifaceted but embraced two major aspects. On the one hand, Maat represented the universal order or balance - including concepts such as truth and right - which was established at the time of creation. This aspect is the basis of her relationship with Ra - for she is the order imposed upon the cosmos created by the solar demiurge and as such is the guiding principle who accompanied the sun at all times. The order represented by Maat must be renewed or preserved constantly, however, leading to the ritual presentation of Maat discussed below. As a natural corollary of her identity with right balance and harmony Maat also actively represented the concept of judgment. In the Pyramid Texts the goddess appears in this role in dual form, as 'the two Maats' judging the deceased king's right to the throne of Geb (PT 317), and in the later funerary literature it is in the 'Hall of the two Truths' (the dual form of Maat) that the judgement of the deceased occurs. The egyptian gods themselves acting as the judges of the divine tribunal are called the 'council of Maat'.

Iconography of Maat

  Picture: The image of Maat, with outspread wings and kneeling on ahieroglyphic sign which could signify 'mourn', was utilizedat the entrance to a number of later New Kingdom royal tombs.19th Dynasty. Tomb of Siptah.Valley of the Kings. Western Thebes.

Maat was almost always depicted in fully anthropomorphic form as a goddess wearing a tall feather on her head. The feather alone could represent the goddess, however, as could the hieroglyphic sign also used to write her name which resembled a builder's measure or the plinth upon which statues of the Egyptian gods were placed. In representations of the king presenting Maat to the gods, the diminutive image of the goddess is sometimes depicted in such a manner as to form a rebus of the name of the king himself. This is the case when Ramesses II presents the goddess holding a 'User' staff and crowned with a solar disk of Ra in addition to her own tall plume in order to spell the king's throne name: User-Maat-Ra. In the vignettes from the funerary papyri and in other depictions Maat is featured in the ceremony of the weighing of the heart of the deceased on the scale of judgement. Usually the heart is depicted being weighed against the feather of Maat or in some cases a small image of the crouching goddess, and the figure of Maat sometimes surmounts the balance scale itself.

Worship of Maat

A small temple to Maat was built within the precinct of the Montu temple at Karnak but such sanctuaries for the formal worship of the goddess are uncommon and Maat is usually depicted in the temple of other Egyptian gods. Even the title 'priest of Maat' is often regarded as an honorific which may have been given to those who served as magistrates or who dispensed judicial decisions on her behalf and who apparently wore small golden images of the goddess as a sign of their judical authority. Theologically, the most important manifestation of the veneration of the goddess was the king's ritual presentation of a small figure of Maat in the temples of the Egyptian gods. In the New Kingdom Maat was offered especially to Amu, Ra and Ptah, though she was also sometimes presented to her husband Thoth and was in effect offered to all the gods. Erik Hornung has pointed out that the equivalence of the presentation of the goddess with all other offerings can be seen in epithets of Maat such as 'food of the gods' and 'clothing' and 'breath', as well in other statements which affirm the Egyptian gods 'live on Maat'. Likewise Emily Teeter has shown that most examples of the king presenting Maat are essentially identcal to those in which the king presents food, wine or other forms of sustenance to the gods. At another level, the offering of the image of the goddess was also a tangible expression of the king's offering of his own work of maintaining maat in preserving order and justice on behalf of the gods.