El concepto de Ma’at en el Antiguo Egipto

Tal vez la mejor explicación de ma’at como principio abstracto la da Wilson en su libro The Culture of Ancient Egypt. Wilson traduce el concepto de ma’at como sigue:

“variously translated as “truth”, “justice”, “righteousness”, “order”, and so on. Each of those translations may be apt in a certain context, but no one English word is always applicable. Ma’at was a quality which belonged to good rule or administration, but it cannot be translated as “rule”, “government”, “administration” or “law”. Ma’at was the proper quality of such applied functions. Basically, ma’at had some of the same flexibility as our English terms “right”, “just”, “true”, and “in order”. It was the cosmic force of harmony, order, stability and security, coming down from the first creation as the organizing quality of created phenomena and reaffirmed at the accession of each god-king of Egypt. In the temple scenes the Pharaoh exhibited ma’at to the other Gods everyday, as the physical evidence that he was carrying out his divine function of rule on their behalf. Thus there was something of the unchanging, eternal, and cosmic about ma’at. If we render it “order”, it was the order of created things, physical and spiritual, established at the beginning and valid for all time.

If we render it “justice”, it was not simply justice in terms of legal administration; it was the just and proper relationship of cosmic phenomena, including the relationship of the rulers and the ruled. If we render it “truth”, we must remember that, to the ancient, things were true not because they were susceptible of testing and verification but because they were recognized as being in their true and proper places in the order created and maintained by the Gods. Ma’at, then was created and inherited rightness, which tradition built up into a concept of orderly stability, in order to confirm rule of the Pharaoh. The opposites of ma’at were words which we translate as “lying”, “falsehood”, and “deceit”. That which was not consonant with the established and accepted order could be denied as being false. Ma’at comes closest to the moral connotation of our word “good”. “

Tobin establece que:

“To the Egyptian mind, ma’at bound all things together in an indestructible unity: the universe, the natural world, the state, and the individual were all seen as parts of the wider order generated by ma’at”.

En muchos aspectos, es un concepto que me recuerda a lo que hoy llamamos derecho natural.