ABSTRACT
The essential thrust and purpose of this work is to delineate and critically examine Maat, the moral ideal of ancient Egypt, using the Declarations of Innocence in the New Kingdom text, The Book ofComing Forth By Day, and other key ethical texts as the fundamental foci for analysis, and in the process explore the usefulness of Maatian ethical thought as a resource for modem moral discourse and philosophic reflection on critical moral issues. By moral ideal I mean the defmitive set of axiological assertions and assumptions which provide a paradigm of the ancient Egyptian conception of the moral or ethical. In other words, I am interested in extracting from the available texts a reliable portrait and understanding of ancient Egypt's highest moral standards, its delineation of right and wrong, its defmitive concepts of relational obligations and rules of conduct and other data which composed and informed the ancient Egyptian moral universe.
