protective · from c. 2400 BCE
The Feather of Ma'at
A single ostrich plume — the counterweight the heart is measured against, and the lightest object in the corpus to carry that much weight.
What the sources claim for it
Truth as a measurable standard, against which a life is weighed literally.
History
Where does the Feather of Ma'at come from?
Ma'at is truth, order and right proportion, and her sign is an ostrich feather worn on her head. In the judgment scene of the Book of the Dead the feather sits in one pan of the balance and the heart of the deceased in the other, with Anubis adjusting and Thoth recording.
The verdict is binary and the standard is exact: the heart must not be heavier. That is the entire theology of the scene, and it is why the feather rather than a weight or a stone is used — the point is that truth has no mass to spare.
4 figures
Who is it attached to?
Figures who carry it
An attribute rather than a signature — held, worn or associated in the texts and the images.
Figures it is used against
The mark is aimed at them. A ward names its target, which makes these the sharpest attributions on the page.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
The weighing scene is the single most reproduced image from ancient Egypt after the pyramids, and 'weighed in the balance' passed into English through the Hebrew Bible's independent use of the same metaphor.
Which texts describe it?
Oldest first, with what each one does with the mark. A mark described in a Bronze Age incantation and a mark first drawn in a seventeenth-century manuscript are different kinds of claim, whatever the shape has in common.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Anonymous; tr. E. A. Wallis Budge · c. 1550 BCE onward · Egyptian
The judgment scene: feather in one pan, heart in the other.
Read The Egyptian Book of the Dead in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Hunefer · Wikimedia file page
Egyptian Hymns, Stelae & Temple Inscriptions
Various; tr. E. A. Wallis Budge and others · c. 2000 BCE - 300 BCE · Egyptian
Ma'at as the order the gods themselves are said to live on.
Read Egyptian Hymns, Stelae & Temple Inscriptions in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France · Wikimedia file page
Nearby
Related marks
The Ankh
The sign for 'life', held to the nose of a king by a god. Not an amulet first — a hieroglyph that got carried into three dimensions.
The Djed Pillar
A four-tiered column meaning stability, later read as the backbone of Osiris and raised upright at festival as a resurrection.
The Was Sceptre
A straight staff with a forked foot and an animal head — and the animal, on the best reading, is Set's.
The Uraeus
A cobra rearing at the front of a crown, understood as the eye of the sun placed where it can spit at whatever approaches the wearer's face.
The Wedjat Eye
The eye Set tore out and Thoth made whole. Wedjat means 'the sound one' — the amulet is named for the repair, not the injury.
The Winged Disc
A sun with wings, borrowed by every empire in the region in turn — and the direct ancestor of the Persian faravahar.