What is the weighing of the heart in ancient Egypt?
The weighing of the heart was the judgment of the dead in ancient Egyptian belief, best known from the Book of the Dead. In the Hall of the Two Truths, the dead person’s heart was set on a pair of scales against the feather of Ma’at, truth and right order. Anubis checked the balance and Thoth wrote down the result. If the heart balanced, the person was declared “true of voice” and led to Osiris, king of the dead. If not, Ammit, the Devourer, would swallow it, and the person would cease to exist.
Why the heart: Egyptians saw the heart (Egyptian ib) as the seat of thought, memory, feeling and conscience: it was a witness to all its owner had done. For that reason it was usually left in the body during embalming, when other organs were taken out, so that it could be weighed.
The scene in the hall: In many papyri, Anubis, the jackal-headed god, leads the dead person to the scales. Thoth, with the head of an ibis, stands ready with his scribe’s palette, and a baboon, another of his forms, may sit on top of the scales. Ammit, part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus, crouches nearby. Osiris presides from his throne, often with Isis and Nephthys behind him.
The 42 judges and the declarations: Spell 125 (chapter 125 in older books) gives the words for the hall. The dead person greets each of 42 judges by name and denies one wrong to each: theft, killing, lying, cheating with the grain measure, making anyone weep and more. Egyptologists call these the declarations of innocence, or the negative confession. The name 42 Laws of Ma’at, common online, is modern.
True of voice: Those who passed were called maa kheru, “true of voice”, words written after the names of the dead on coffins, tomb walls and papyri. Horus then led them by the hand to Osiris, as in the Papyrus of Hunefer in the British Museum. In the papyri the scales normally hang level, with Ammit left waiting: the picture shows the verdict its owner hoped for.
How Gerald Massey read it in 1907: Massey calls the hall the hall of Mati and its judges “forty-two masters of truth”. Against a claim he cites from the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, that a person’s deeds did not affect their fate after death, he argues that they did: the dead are judged by what they have done, and they do not plead for mercy. He reads Makheru, his spelling of maa kheru, as “the word made truth”: the dead must have made the words of the Book of the Dead true in their lives. He calls the declarations a list of “pre-Christian virtues”, and argues that the Hebrew commandments were drawn from them.
What scholars say now: Egyptologists hold, as Massey argued, that conduct counted: spell 125 sets out an ideal of honest and generous living. But the dead also sought help with the verdict: spell 30B, carved on heart scarabs laid on the mummy’s chest, asks the heart not to speak against its owner. Maa kheru is translated “true of voice” or “justified”: the dead person was declared in the right. The declarations and the Ten Commandments are often compared, but most scholars do not think one was copied from the other.
In Massey’s words: “He knows it is the life, the character, the conduct that will count in the scales of Maati for the life hereafter.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book IV, p. 242)
In the app: Today › 42 Days of Ma’at. In the app, 42 Days of Ma’at gives one declaration a day in E. A. Wallis Budge’s translation, and the Trainer lesson The heart in the scales follows Massey into the hall of judgment.