The Uses of the Goddess Maat - The Proposal of a Cultural Identity in Ancient Egypt: An Analysis of the Literary Texts of the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 B.C.)
Maat, cultural identity, egyptian society"
When examining a society as distant from contemporary minds as Ancient Egypt, it is necessary to make some observations:The Egyptian universe is understood through a monistic perspective, which was required as a political project to achieve an identity that would establish cohesion and coherence for Egyptian society. Thus, the monistic perspective posits that everything that exists is interchangeable, leading to the belief that Deshret and Duat were indistinguishable. Consequently, people, gods, and nature are part of a unified whole. Additionally, there are dualities such as light and darkness, order and chaos. This dual view does not imply that these elements are opposites but rather complementary.Furthermore, there are three cosmogonic myths of creation, each associated with a different city: Memphis, Heliopolis, and Hermopolis. Despite the differences in the gods—Ptah, Atum, and Thoth, respectively—the triad of genesis has a single purpose: the creation of the ordered cosmos. This order is maintained by the goddess Maat, whose epithets are order, truth, and justice. Maat also embodies notions such as harmony, righteousness, wisdom, and balance. To maintain this order, everything contrary to the goddess was to be suppressed, considered as isefet, meaning chaos.Maat emerges from the Egyptian religious narrative and expresses a decorum required to be observed by all "men of the Nile." The Pharaoh's role was to "make Maat," while society was tasked with the pursuit of "saying" and "performing Maat" in their daily lives. Therefore, when studying Maat, the key issue this research addresses is how the goddess Maat was transferred from Egyptian religiosity to the attainment of a cultural identity, which enabled the "Red Land" to maintain three thousand years of power, up to the current unprecedented context.