MA'AT

also spelled Mayet in ancient Egyptian religion, the personification of truth, justice, and the cosmic order. The daughter of the sun god Re, she was associated with Thoth, god of wisdom. The ceremony of judgment of the dead (called the Judgment of Osiris, named for Osiris, the god of the dead) was believed to focus upon the weighing of the heart of the deceased in a scale balanced by Ma'at (or her hieroglyph, the ostrich feather), as a test of conformity to proper values. The Hall of Double Justice where this occurred was so called from Ma'at's frequent appearances there as two identical goddesses. In its abstract sense, ma'at was the divine order established at creation and reaffirmed at the accession of each new king of Egypt. In setting ma'at, order, in place of izfet, disorder, the king played the role of the sun god, the god with the closest links to Ma'at. Ma'at stood at the head of the sun god's bark as it traveled through the sky and the underworld. Although aspects of kingship and of ma'at were at times subjected to criticism and reformulation, the principles underlying these two institutions were fundamental to ancient Egyptian life and thought and endured to the end of ancient Egyptian history.