{
  "id": "maat",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Maat",
  "summary": "Goddess of truth and law who embraces Ra \"at morn and at eve\", lays down his course with Thoth, and gives her name to the Hall of the Two Maati where Osiris and the Forty-two judges weigh the heart; the dead man's \"I live upon truth. I feed upon truth\" is addressed to her order. No Greek witness names her.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "egyptian",
    "deities",
    "goddesses",
    "truth",
    "law",
    "judgment"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ra"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "thoth"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "osiris"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "duat"
    },
    {
      "rel": "discussed_in",
      "target": "egyptian-gods-list"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who is Maat?",
    "What is the Hall of the Two Maati?",
    "What is the role of Maat in the judgment of the dead?",
    "Is Maat a goddess or a concept?",
    "Which gods are called lords of truth in Egyptian texts?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "A funerary hymn to Ra says \"the goddess Maat embraceth thee at morn and at eve\", that \"Thoth and the goddess Maat have laid down thy course for thee daily for ever\", and asks to \"see Horus steering thy boat, with Thoth and Maat standing one on each side of him\"; Budge glosses her as \"Goddess of Law\" (Budge Lit. ch. IV).",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.92
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The hymn to Osiris in the Papyrus of Ani says \"He toweth along the earth by Maat in his name of 'Seker'\", and Budge's note defines her as \"the goddess of physical and moral law, and the personification of the conscience\" (Budge Lit. ch. IV).",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Chapter 125 is spoken in \"the 'Usekht Maati,' or Hall of the Two Maati goddesses, one for Upper Egypt and one for Lower Egypt, wherein Osiris and his Forty-two Judges judge the souls of the dead\"; the dead man greets \"thou Lord of Maati\", denies forty-two sins, and tells the gods of the Hall \"I live upon truth. I feed upon truth ... I have not borne false witness\" (Budge Lit. ch. IV).",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.92
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The Book of Breathings promises \"Thou art purified by the Goddesses of Truth in the Great Hall\", names the dead \"'Stone of Truth'\", and says \"The Goddess of Truth vindicateth thee before Osiris, and her writings are upon thy tongue\" (Budge Lit. ch. V).",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Truth is a title other gods carry: Thoth is \"the Prince of Truth in heaven and on earth\" (Budge Lit. ch. VII), Amen-Ra \"Lord of Truth\" and \"Maker of Truth\" (Budge Lit. ch. XII), and the Sun-god \"the Judge of words and deeds ... who stablishest truth, and doest away sin\" (Budge Lit. ch. XII). Plutarch's nearest echo is the festival saying \"A sweet thing is Truth\" (Plut. Is. 68); neither he nor Herodotus writes Maat.",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians",
        "plutarch-isis-osiris"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.88
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [
    "Both at once in the texts: a goddess who embraces Ra, and the 'truth' the dead man lives on and the judges feed upon.",
    "Her hall is doubled — two Maati, for Upper and Lower Egypt — a detail the usual \"feather of Maat\" summary drops.",
    "She is Egyptian-only in this corpus; the Greek witnesses have the idea of truth but not the name."
  ],
  "faqs": [
    {
      "q": "What is the Hall of the Two Maati?",
      "claim": "c3"
    },
    {
      "q": "What is the role of Maat in the judgment of the dead?",
      "claim": "c3"
    },
    {
      "q": "Is Maat a goddess or a concept?",
      "claim": "c2"
    },
    {
      "q": "Which gods are called lords of truth in Egyptian texts?",
      "claim": "c5"
    }
  ],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "theoretical",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Pages describe Maat abstractly. This object binds every statement to a chapter of Budge's Book of the Dead extracts — the hymn, the Hall of the Two Maati, the Book of Breathings — so an agent can quote the Egyptian sentence rather than the modern paraphrase.",
  "confidence": 0.9,
  "last_verified": "2026-09-03",
  "media": [],
  "x": {
    "myth": {
      "pantheon": "egyptian",
      "kind": "deity",
      "group": "other",
      "domains": [
        "truth",
        "law",
        "cosmic order",
        "the judgment of the dead"
      ],
      "symbols": [
        "balance"
      ],
      "wikidata": "Q170471"
    }
  },
  "canonical_url": "https://mythosdata.dev/k/maat",
  "api_url": "https://mythosdata.dev/api/k/maat.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Maat",
    "description": "Goddess of truth and law who embraces Ra \"at morn and at eve\", lays down his course with Thoth, and gives her name to the Hall of the Two Maati where Osiris and the Forty-two judges weigh the heart; the dead man's \"I live upon truth. I feed upon truth\" is addressed to her order. No Greek witness names her.",
    "url": "https://mythosdata.dev/k/maat",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-09-03",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris (De Iside et Osiride) — tr. William Baxter, rev. W. W. Goodwin (1874), Perseus TEI edition",
        "url": "https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/blob/master/data/tlg0007/tlg089/tlg0007.tlg089.perseus-eng3.xml"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "E. A. Wallis Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1914), Project Gutenberg #15932 via GITenberg",
        "url": "https://github.com/GITenberg/The-Literature-of-the-Ancient-Egyptians_15932/blob/master/15932.txt"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Maat"
  }
}