ABSTRACT
Maat () was a central category in ancient Egyptian philosophy. Its extension covers the domains of both justice and truth, and it was frequently personified as a goddess with a special role in adjudicating the afterlife and justifying dynastic rule. Maat has long been recognized as integral to ancient Egyptian thought, and there have been several sustained analyses of the roles it might play vis-a-vis first-order moral principles. Egyptologists typically translate maat as ‘truth’ or ‘justice’, without much thought as to how that disjunction could be coherently inclusive or what kind of metaphysics of morals might be involved. The word was graphically represented in slightly different ways, most commonly as either ‘’ or just ‘’, but sometimes in its full phonetic form ‘’. Language is the primary generative force in Egyptian metaphysics. The inaugural act of the universe is creation ex nihilo by means of speech.
