The Principle That Holds the World Together

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.