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The Weighing of the Heart in the Hall of Maat. To the ancient Egyptians, the judgment of the dead was the process that allowed the Egyptian gods to judge the worthiness of the souls of the deceased. Deeply rooted in the Egyptian belief in immortality, judgment was one of the most important parts of the journey through the afterlife.
The Weighing of the Heart would take place in Duat (the Underworld), in which the dead were judged by Anubis, using a feather, representing Ma'at, the goddess of truth and justice responsible for maintaining order in the universe. The heart was the seat of the life-spirit .
Shows heart being weighed on the scale of Maat against the feather of truth, by the jackal-headed Anubis. Ammit stands ready to eat the heart if it fails the test. The ibis-headed Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the result. The Book of the Dead was a collection of funerary texts used to guide the dead to Duat, the Egyptian underworld.
A heart which was unworthy was devoured by the goddess Ammit and its owner condemned to remain in the Duat. [58] The weighing of the heart, as typically pictured on papyrus in the Book of the Dead, or in tomb scenes, shows Anubis
The Weighing of the Heart as depicted in the Papyrus of Hunefer (19th Dynasty, c. 1300 BC) The deceased's first task was to correctly address each of the forty-two Assessors of Maat by name, while reciting the sins they did not commit during their lifetime. [ 44 ]
An important part of the Egyptian soul was thought to be the jb (ib), or heart. [18] In the Egyptian religion, the heart was the key to the afterlife. It was essential to surviving death in the nether world, where it gave evidence for, or against, its possessor.
A section of the Egyptian Book of the Dead showing the "Weighing of the Heart" in the Duat. In Ancient Egypt, it was believed that upon death, one's fate in the afterlife was determined by the weighing of one's heart. One's heart was kept within the body during mummification so that it can travel with the deceased into the afterlife.
The heart (ib / jb) of the deceased was then weighed on a two-plate scale: a plate for the heart, the other for the feather of Maat. Maat, in whose name the 42 judges who flanked Osiris acted, was the deification of truth , justice, rectitude, and order of the cosmos and was often symbolized by an ostrich feather (the hieroglyphic sign of her ...