Deity · Egyptian · c. 1550 BCE
The Forty-Two Assessors
Also called The Judges of the Dead, The Assessors of Maat
Forty-two Egyptian judges of the dead, each responsible for exactly one offence, addressed by name and told 'I have not done it'.
Well sourced
The Negative Confession of chapter 125 is the strangest and most human document in Egyptian religion. The dead person faces forty-two assessors, each with a name and a home town, and denies one specific sin to each: I have not stolen, I have not killed, I have not taken milk from the mouth of a child, I have not fouled the water, I have not been deaf to true words. The list is a working ethical code assembled from the everyday. Notably it is a denial rather than a plea — the dead argue their case rather than beg — and the heart is weighed afterwards to check whether the argument holds.
The names themselves are worth a second look. Each assessor is a description paired with a place — Bone-breaker, Eater of shades, Nosey — so the tribunal is populated by what its members do rather than by anything anyone worshipped. That is a naming habit, and it belongs to the forty-two names inside the group rather than to the group's own name.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
The Hall of Two Truths, a place in the Duat rather than in Egypt.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Coffin Texts · c. 2100–1800 BCE
- Named there as
- the tribunal
- Rank
- Tribunal of the Duat
- Pantheon
- Egyptian
- Order
- Egyptian pantheon
- Base of operations
- The Hall of Two Truths, a place in the Duat rather than in Egypt.
- Era
- c. 1550 BCE
- Traditions
- Egyptian
- Placed in
- The Hall of Two Truths
Traits
- Domain
- Interrogation of the dead, one sin apiece
- Traditional form
- Forty-two seated figures, each named and each from a named place
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to The Forty-Two Assessors, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- knowledge2
- martial1
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names The Forty-Two Assessors, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 550 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as the tribunal, The Forty-Two
The declarations of innocence before a court of the dead, in the layer that first extends the afterlife beyond the king — before the number is fixed at forty-two and before each judge is given a name and a town. Cited as the stage the Book of the Dead's list develops out of, not as the same text at an earlier date.
Each hears the denial of one named offence in the Negative Confession before the heart is weighed.
“Hail, thou whose strides are long, who comest forth from Annu: I have not done iniquity.”
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
The Negative Confession is regularly cited as an early ethical code, and it does read as one: it forbids fouling water, stopping irrigation, taking milk from a child's mouth and being deaf to true words. It is denial rather than plea, which is a different posture from later penitential traditions.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention The Forty-Two Assessors?
What rank is The Forty-Two Assessors?
How else is The Forty-Two Assessors spelled?
What is The Forty-Two Assessors said to do?
How old is The Forty-Two Assessors?
Nearest in the corpus
If The Forty-Two Assessors is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Khepri
The Morning Sun · Egyptian
The sun at dawn, in the form of a scarab beetle rolling it up over the horizon — one of the three daily aspects of the sun, and a pun on the word for coming into being.
Anubis
Guide of the Dead · Egyptian
Embalmer and psychopomp, who leads the dead to the scales — the office Western tradition eventually gives to Michael and to Azrael.
Horus
Falcon King · Egyptian
Son of Osiris, who contends eighty years with Set for the throne. Every living pharaoh was understood to be his incarnation.
Isis
Great of Magic · Egyptian
The great magician who reassembles Osiris and tricks Ra into surrendering his secret name. Her cult eventually reached as far as Roman Britain.
Nephthys
Lady of the House · Egyptian
Set's wife who sides with her sister Isis against him, and mourns Osiris at the head of the bier.
Osiris
Lord of the Dead · Egyptian
Murdered by Set, reassembled by Isis, and installed as judge of the dead. He is the earliest fully developed dying-and-rising sovereign we have.
The books behind The Forty-Two Assessors
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Coffin Texts
Anonymous; painted on the coffins of officials and their families · c. 2100–1800 BCE · Middle Egyptian
Read The Coffin Texts in full ↗The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Anonymous; tr. E. A. Wallis Budge · c. 1550 BCE onward · Egyptian
Read The Egyptian Book of the Dead in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Hunefer · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.