Ma’at
The Egyptian goddess of truth, justice and the right order of the world, drawn as a woman with a single ostrich feather upright on her head. The feather alone could stand for her.
Meaning
Ma’at (muh-OTT, as Kemetic Orthodoxy says it) is a goddess and an idea. The Global Egyptian Museum calls maat the cosmic order that came into being when creation banished chaos: order, justice and truth, the opposite of chaos, evil and lies. Budge (1904) traces the word to “that which is straight”, perhaps first the name of the instrument that kept a craftsman’s work straight, and compares the Greek word that meant a straight rod and then a mason’s rule. As a goddess she is a woman, seated or standing, with an ostrich feather fastened to her headdress, holding a sceptre in one hand and the sign of life in the other; in many pictures she has wings on her arms, and in a few an ostrich feather in place of a head (Budge). She was called the daughter of Ra, and she stood with Thoth in Ra’s boat. Kemetic Orthodoxy (the House of Netjer), a religion practised today, pictures her “with a white ostrich feather in a band on Her head”.
Origin and history
Why the ostrich feather belongs to Maat is unknown, Budge (1904) says, but the link is very ancient and probably goes back before the first dynasties. In the hymns to Ra she keeps the sun to its path: “the god Thoth and the goddess Maat have written down thy daily course for thee every day”, and Budge reads her as the regularity with which the sun rose and set. Her best-known part is in the judgement of the dead. In the Hall of the two Maats the heart of the dead person was weighed against the goddess, often shown as a feather (Global Egyptian Museum), and in some vignettes, Budge says, she takes the form of the balance itself. The weighing is told on the feather of Maat page.
Maat was also the king’s business. The Global Egyptian Museum says it was his duty to keep that order, and that he issued laws from his knowledge of Maat. One of the most important gifts a king made to the gods was a small statue of the goddess, and the vizier, as the king’s deputy, was a “Priest of Maat”; the museum notes a suggestion that the statuette he wore on a chain was his badge of office. When Akhenaten’s reign ended and the old cults returned, Maat was said to be restored, and a stela of Tutankhamun describes the desolate state Egypt had been left in.
A goddess or an idea?
The sources weigh this differently. Erman, writing in 1907, called Maat “a pure abstraction”, “entirely a product of human invention” and as artificial as the personified beauty or wisdom of poetry, though he granted that her priests were the supreme judges and that she ranked among the goddesses as early as the Old Kingdom. The Global Egyptian Museum treats maat as the most important principle of the world, which gods and people alike “lived on”, and notes how few temples were built for the goddess herself; one of the most important is at Karnak.
The goddess and the feather
The feather on her head is her sign, and the feather alone can stand for her (Global Egyptian Museum). Ptah stands on a pedestal shaped like the hieroglyph of her name. Budge describes the hall of judgement drawn with a cornice of uraei and of feathers that stand for Maat.
Ma’at in Kemetic Orthodoxy
Kemetic Orthodoxy speaks of living in ma’at. Its glossary says the word “doesn’t translate adequately into English” and defines it as something between “truth”, “harmony” and “stability”, comparing it to the Dao of Daoism: “When your life is in Ma’at, you can feel it, and it generates more Ma’at as it persists.” It calls the goddess “perhaps one of the most abstract and all-pervasive subjects in Kemetic Orthodoxy”.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsNutThe Egyptian sky goddess, drawn as a woman arched over the earth with her hands and feet at its edges and stars on her body. She swallowed the sun each evening and gave birth to it each morning, and was painted inside coffin lids to stretch over the dead.
- The goddess’s ostrich feather; the feather alone can stand for her (Global Egyptian Museum)Feather of MaatA single ostrich feather, the emblem of Maat: right and truth, against which the heart of the dead was weighed.
See also
Thoth, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, Anubis.
Sources
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), ch. XIII, pp. 416–418
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), p. 20
- Maat, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, entry
- Kemetic Terms, Public documents, House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), entry “ma’at”
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from crosses or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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