The image of a balance weighing a person's worth at death is one of the oldest and most widely distributed motifs in ancient religious art and text, and setting the Islamic Mizan beside its predecessors shows both how old the image is and how differently each tradition uses it.
In ancient Egyptian funerary religion, the Book of the Dead describes the heart of the deceased weighed on a scale against the feather of Ma'at, the principle of truth and cosmic order, before Osiris and a tribunal of forty-two divine judges; a heart heavier than the feather condemned its owner to be devoured by the monster Ammit, while a heart that balanced the feather permitted passage to the afterlife. The scene, depicted repeatedly in tomb paintings, long predates any Abrahamic text.
Zoroastrian eschatology likewise weighs a person's thoughts, words and deeds on a balance held by the god Rashnu at the individual judgment following death; a favorable balance permits crossing the Chinvat bridge, itself a parallel to the Islamic Sirat, while an unfavorable one casts the soul into torment.
Greek religion supplies a related but structurally different image in Homer's account of Zeus weighing the keres, the death-lots of opposing warriors before Troy, in golden scales to determine which will die, a weighing of destiny rather than moral worth: only the Egyptian, Zoroastrian and Islamic versions weigh conduct against a standard, while Homer's scene weighs an already-fixed fate. Historians of religion generally treat the recurrence of weighing imagery as best explained by the intuitive power of weighing as a metaphor for exactness, available independently to any tradition that reaches for one, rather than a single line of transmission connecting all of them.