Chapter 9

Maat
The Cultural
and Intellectual Allegiance o f a Concept
By Mario H. Beatty

The Djehuty Project

African-Centered Think Tank and Research Institution

• I am a listener: I hear Maat and ponder it in the heart.1

• Anyone attempting to write on the African world-view has to
approach his subject with much humility, realizing that rather
than teaching Africa anything by his writing, he is trying to
learn from tradition.2
• I am because we are; since we are, therefore I am.3
• If we are to defend our (Western) culture and its basic values to
the death—and a death that might destroy the entire human
race—we certainly need to know precisely what we are trying to
preserve.4

nowledge of African history and culture is essential in the process of

K reflecting upon the nature and purpose of our lives and how to conduct
them in the best interests of African people. The significance of the echoing
1 .1 have made an independent analysis of this portion of the Stela of Antef using
Hieroglyphic Texts from Egyptian Stelae, etc., in the British Museum, vol. II (London, 1912) pi.
23. See Appendix A, p. 241, for a descriptive analysis of this passage.
2. Alexander Okanlawon, “Africanism—A Synthesis of the African World-View,” Black
World (July 1972): 41.
3. See John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor
Books, 1970), 141.
4. Shepard B. Clough, Basic Values o f Western Civilization (New York: Columbia Univer­
sity Press, 1969), 3.

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unison of African scholars in unmasking the pejorative subjectivity of much

of Western discourse relative to African people and renouncing an unobtainable
objectivity in historical interpretation is not to be underestimated. For African
historiography, this has meant the recognition of a legitimate place for values
in historical interpretation in tandem with scholarly and rigorous investigation.
For us, then, history becomes the living past, not a detached and reified thing
to interpret. The idea of pursuing an objective historical truth for its own sake
with a detached indifference to a commitment to preserve and perpetuate culture
and community is alien to the African world view. The ancestors speak to us
and through us, yet as Ptahhotep affirms “no one is bom wise.”5 Our task is to
listen, learn, and study the wisdom of our ancestors and ponder it in our hearts
in order to guide the restoration of our ancestral legacy and derive usable
truths from it.
Maat is a concept that is fundamental in understanding the Kemetic
(ancient Egyptian) and hence the African world view. Embedded in Maat are
a number of critical assumptions about the nature of the cosmos, society, the
person, and their inextricable interrelatedness which are in stark contrast and,
indeed, alien to the narrative of Western Civilization. Thus, in translating Af­
rican concepts into modem European languages, we must strive to go beyond
literal appearances to understand the cultural substance and mental processes
that spoke these concepts into existence. In explaining Maat, this means going
beyond the definition of it as truth, justice, righteousness, and universal order
to provide some sense of what African people meant by these notions because
they do not even remotely parallel the Western sense of these terms.
Two of the above quotations, one representing a Western point of view
and the other representing a fundamental assumption of African people, speak
to this dynamic and have tremendous implications for how we interpret
these concepts and, more importantly, how we use them to interact with other
cultures.
When African scholars juxtapose the African notion “I am because we
are; since we are therefore I am,” against the Western Descartean notion “I
think, therefore I am,” more is suggested than a mere difference of values.
They also allude to how a culture perceives reality.6 Thus, in the West each
5. Zybnek Zaba, Les Maximes de Ptahhotep (Prague: Editions de L ’academie
Tchecoslovaque des Sciences, 1956), lines 41,19; Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Litera­
ture, vol. I, The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 63.
6. The point I want to convey here is that / and we suggest more than what a culture val­
ues. More importantly, they allude to the “patterns for interpreting reality” by a culture. Wade
Nobles defines culture as “a scientific construct representing the vast structure of language, .be­
havior, customs, knowledge, symbols, ideas, values, matter and mind, which provide a people
with a general design for living and patterns for interpreting their reality.” See Wade Nobles,
“The Reclamation of Culture and the Right to Reconciliation: An Afro-centric Perspective on

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person is fundamentally seen as an /, a conscious entity set off from the cos­
mic order and social community. If this is the logic of the culture, then con­
cepts are created to guide the culture toward manipulating reality to conform
to this image.
Shepherd Clough sets this task for himself in his work Basic Values o f
Western Civilization. He discusses major values of Western culture such as
“the end of man is man,” materialism, the glorification of progress, and tech­
nology in order to make Western peoples conscious of the cultural matrix that
they must preserve, perpetuate, and defend, even if it means the destruction of
“the entire human race.” The substance of this view is not an anomaly even
though it may be concealed under such seemingly altruistic terms as national
pride, national interest, patriotism, and humanitarianism. In the modem era,
Western culture continues to view African history and culture as exhibiting an
intractable illness of barbarism, the return to which must be prevented if Afri­
cans want to take advantage of the fruits of civilization and progress.
African people fundamentally understand the world in terms of we, in
terms of the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of the Creator, cosmos,
society, and the person. This view determines what we see as truth, how we
see truth, and how we act upon the world with this truth. This we is not to be
misunderstood as a humanizing mission, nor is it to be reduced to a balkanized
mentality that frowns upon interaction with other human cultures. We must be
politically astute enough to recognize that we must self-consciously protect
and defend the sacredness of African history and culture in the face of en­
emies who are equally, if not more, committed to preserving the sacredness of
something different that has absolutely nothing to do with humanizing the
world and who have no problem erasing African traditions in the process.
Thus, we implies nothing less than the cultural unity of Africa, Pan-Africanism,
and nationalism.7
The above form of historical inquiry has an honorable and respectable
lineage among African people. These scholar/activists have shown that the
question of intellectual and cultural allegiance is always present in historical
interpretation. For my purposes, I want to use Maat as a springboard to speak
to this issue which Maulana Karenga refers to as the “modem Maatian” dis­
course that must involve a unique “transcendent dimension” to speak to the
Developing and Implementing Programs for the Mentally Retarded Offender” (reprint, Oak­
land, California: The Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture, 1982), 44.
Herein, my use of I and we speak to both a culture’s “general design for living and patterns for
interpreting reality.”
7. The power of the concepts of the cultural unity of Africa, Pan-Africanism, and nation­
alism is in their ability to see African people holistically and to use this knowledge politically
as a springboard to provide a vision of African liberation that transcends the geographical bor­
ders erected by the European concept of nation-state.

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contemporary condition of African people.8 Hence, my discussion of Maat in

its historical context will be admittedly more narrative than descriptive. I will
provide a rudimentary, symbolic presentation of Maat to fill a visible lacunae
in the literature focusing on how various scholars have conceptualized Maat
and the practical implications of their interpretations relative to the question
of intellectual and cultural allegiance.9

Maat
A Symbolic Presentation and the Problematic o f Translation
A major strength of the African world view is its ability to at once distinguish
aspects of reality without arguing for separation. African people create rich
metaphors and symbols in order to convey “dramatic presentations of truth
seeking and revelation of truth.”10These symbols reveal a profound and mul­
tilayered knowledge of the universe that illuminates and uncovers the unity
between their lives, their natural environment, celestial phenomena, and the
Creator. Indeed, as Asante affirms, “we can never know all aspects of the
symbol. It is unlimited, infinite.”11Yet these symbols both represent and re­
flect how African people see reality and how they convey and transmit this
knowledge.
The sense of we, the sense of interrelatedness, interdependence, and
interconnectedness, is intrinsic to Maat. This is precisely why Maat cannot be
encapsuled or rendered properly by any Western parallel term.12The necessity
to translate Maat as cosmic order, truth, justice, righteousness, harmony, bal­
ance, and reciprocity in the English language profoundly reflects the frag-
8. Putting Maat in soci-historical context, Karenga states that “there is nothing in
Maatian ethics historically which justifies going beyond socially-sanctioned norms.” Therefore,
the contemporary condition of African people calls for a “transcendent dimension” to Maat for
it to be applicable. See Maulana Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study
of Classical African Ethics,” vol. II (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1994), 553­
554. It also should be noted that African Americans would probably be the primary focus in
executing this “transcendent dimension,” not African people in general. See his rubric of “pri­
ority focus” in Maulana Karenga, “Black Studies and the Problematic of Paradigm: The
Philosophical Dimension,” Journal o f Black Studies 18, no. 4 (June 1988): 405.
9. The inspiration for my interest in posing this as a relevant issue in discussing Maat
comes from a work by Jacob H. Carruthers. See Jacob H. Carruthers, African or American: A
Question o f Intellectual Allegiance (Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 1994). '
10. Jacob H. Carruthers, Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies (Los Angeles: The Univer­
sity of Sankore Press, 1992), 52.
11. Molefi Kete Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (Trenton, N.J.: Africa
World Press, Inc., 1992), 87.
12. In describing Maat, Henri Frankfort provides a similar commentary admitting that .
“where society is part of a universal divine order, our contrast has no meaning. The laws of na­
ture, the laws of society, and the divine commands all belong to one category of what is right.”
See Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion (New York: Harper and Row Publishers), 54.

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mentary mess we find ourselves in. All the categories that we must use to
approximate this concept was for the Kemites one word. It is even more pro­
found to note that in Kemet, to my knowledge, you cannot find any discourse
which asks what is truth, justice, righteousness, and so on. This shows that the
essence of Maat could be communicated without being misapprehended or
misinterpreted. Hence, Maat did not need to be politically debated, argued
over, nor reformulated. When isft (disorder) occurs, Maat must simply be re­
stored, but its meaning was never questioned. This, of course, is unlike West­
ern philosophy where notions of truth, justice, and righteousness are relative
and existential terms that have no true essence, and because of this, they are
endlessly debated.
The insufficiency of Western concepts relative to translating African
reality is a major issue in African historiography. Finnestad admits that, all
too often “the European outlook on fife appears in an Egyptian guise, and the
question of historical plausibility is not even raised.”13In translating Maat as
cosmic order, truth, and justice, we must be cognizant of this issue so as to
avoid the reification of these notions such that we believe that they have an
inherent meaning that transcends culture. On this point, Finnestad is again
perceptive when he submits that words can function “almost like axioms, be­
cause even when efforts are made to avoid transferring these categories on to
the Egyptian material in the translating process, they may indirectly exert their
influence through being embedded in the analytical concepts applied, and in
the very terminology at the translator’s disposal.”14This is not to say that con­
ventional terms such as truth, justice, and cosmic order cannot be used in
translating Maat, although knowledge of African languages can do nothing
but aid in this process. It is meant to say that these conventional terms must
not be projected culturally into the Kemetic past with the mind of Western
prejudice which will inevitably yield a situation whereby we begin to com­
pare incomparables.15

13. Ragnhild Bjerre Finnestad, “Egyptian Thought About Life as a Problem of Transla­
tion” in The Religion o f the Ancient Egyptians: Cognitive Structures and Popular Expressions,
ed. Gertie Englund (Uppsala 1987), 37.
14. Ibid., 34.
13. Admittedly, this is a struggle that will require a team of African scholars, specifically
in the area of linguistics, to create African models based on the assumption of the cultural unity
of African people to aid in the process of translation. Dr. Thdophile Obenga has been foremost
among African scholars in the endeavor to detach the Kemetic language from being analyzed in
the context of the Semitic or Afro-Asiatic cultural and linguistic universe and restoring it to its
proper place within the cultural and linguistic universe of Africa. His forthcoming book, “An­
cient Egyptian Grammar,” will move us forward in this endeavor. For Obenga’s position on
these issues in French, see Thdophile Obenga, Origine Commune de VEgyptien, du Copte, et
des Langues Negro-Africaines Modemes: Introduction a la Linguistique Historique Africaine

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Because Maat is not an object, it cannot be known as an object. Maat is

not a Newtonian machine with isolated or separate parts interacting by law.
Maat does not have distinct parts or entities, but possesses interrelated and
interconnected manifestations of a cosmic whole. It is a we awareness that
does not divide up the world into separate and self-contained units. Distinc­
tions are made, yet there is never any fragmentation. Maat is expressed at all
levels and conveys the unitary nature and order of the universe. As universal
order, Maat was intimately linked to, although not limited to, the creation of
the world; the orderly movement of the sun, moon, celestial bodies, and the
seasons; and the divine role of the king, leadership, society, family, and the
relationships between people. The harmonious interaction and co-existence
of these aspects ensured the maintenance of Maat. One did not need philo­
sophical reflection nor religious dogma to apprehend the essence of Maat.
Consequently, Maat can also be seen as “a path in front of him who knows
nothing.”16 Since I assume that Maat must be seen first and foremost as a
unified whole before commenting on its many manifestations, it becomes
important to undertake a symbolic analysis of a few of the various ways Ke-
mites visually represented this divine concept.17The following are variations
of Maat as symbolically represented by Kemites:

As both a proper and abstract noun, Maat is composed of three ideo­

grams: the sickle-shaped end of the sacred wii boat (_>), a pedestal, platform
(Paris: Editions l’Harmattan, 1993). Fbr the Semitic/Afro-Asiatic position, see J. H. Greenberg,
Languages c f Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folk­
lore, and Linguistics, 1963). Finnestad, whose analysis of the problems of translating Kemetic
thought is keen, proposes holistic models in Western thought that use such intellectual figures
as Giordano Bruno, die sixteenth century Italian philosopher, and Benedict Spinoza, the seven­
teenth century Dutch Jewish philosopher, as helpful aids in the process of translation. It is
interesting to speculate on why he felt the need to comb the annals of Western philosophy to
pose the thought of two seemingly heretical philosophers of the Western tradition as aids in
translating Kemetic thought. In a profound way, it speaks to the intractable nature of translating
African concepts into Western languages and implies that the narrative of Western philosophy
is incapable of an accurate rendition of African deep thought. See Finnestad, “Egyptian
Thought About life," 38.1 bring this issue up to specifically say that translations are not neu- ,
tral; they involve cultural interpretation and ate, indeed, a contested intellectual terrain that we
must deal with.
16. See Zbynek Zaba, Les Maximes de Ptahhotep, line 91, p. 23.
17. I use symbol intentionally to suggest both how the Kemites understood reality and the
multilayered intellectual depth of this understanding. Bonnet, among other Egyptologists,
would disagree with this use. He states that “when we try to analyze or interpret what in our
modem language we call ‘concept,’ ‘notion,’ ‘symbol,’ or ‘principle,’ we must keep in mind
that such was not the way of thinking in Pharaonic Egypt. Abstraction was an unknown ap-

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or a primeval mound? ( = ) , and a forearm (—«). It also has a loaf of bread t (o)
placed at the end which not only grammatically indicates that it is a feminine
word, but is also an indication of her divine role as a Goddess who was, among
other epithets, “Mistress of all the Gods,” “Lady of the Sky,” and “daughter of
Ra.”18 These epithets indicate her relevance in sustaining creation and her
essential role in maintaining divine order and equilibrium in the cosmos. The
loaf of bread t (^) also distinguishes Maat from m V [i.e., (to be) true, just, and
right] and thus, symbolically conveys not only her absolute and all-encom­
passing presence, but also the notion that she provides sustenance for every­
thing in the cosmos. The remaining symbols function as determinatives,
that is, they are symbols placed at the end of the word to clarify, in a more
precise manner, the word in question. The determinatives have no pho­
netic value meaning that they are not pronounced, transliterated, nor
translated. They are used with semantic intent. The following symbols are to
be read as determinatives: the egg (o), the feather (f), the papyrus rolled up,
tied, and sealed (=«=).
These variations provide a rudimentary, albeit essential, indication of
Maat and its relevance in speaking to truth, justice, and order on the cosmic,
social, and personal level.19
One of the epithets of Maat is “Lady of the Bark.”20 Ra, the Creator of
gods, people, and the universe, is accompanied by Maat and Djehuty in the
sacred solar barque when they emerge from the primeval waters of Nun at Sep
Tepy (The First lim e).21 Maat was essential to the creation of the world and
proach to reality and such was evidently the case of consciousness of which the Ancient
Egyptian does not seem to have had full awareness . . . ” See Roland G. Bonnet, “The Ethics
of El-Amama,” in Studies in Egyptology: Presented to Miriam Lichtheim, Vol. I, ed. Sarah
Israelit-Groll (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1990), 78. If by
abstraction, Bonnel means that the Kemites did not have a mentality that withdrew from their
surroundings in order to reflect on them, he would be correct. The African mentality does not
have to be withdrawn in order to reveal profound knowledge of the universe. If by symbol he
means that the Kemites did not create images that merely “stood-for” something else, he
would also be correct. Africans believe in the creative and powerful force of the word.
Abstract thinking for African people does not involve the ontological separation of spirit and
matter. With this assumption, Kemites created a profound spiritual and scientific knowledge
that was never divorced from the living human lifeworld.
18. For a visual representation of these and other epithets of Maat, see Thdophile
Obenga, Icons o f Maat (Philadelphia: The Source Editions, 1996).
19. For more symbolic and semantic variations of Maat, see E. A. Wallis Budge, An
Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, vol. I (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1978), 270­
271; Raymond O. Faulkner, A Concise Dictionary o f Middle Egyptian (Oxford: Griffith
Institute, 1991), 101-102; Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow, Worterbuch Der Aegyptischen
Sprache, vol. II (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1928), 18-20.
20. Dilwyn Jones, Boats (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 14.
21. Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology (NewYoik:Peter Bedrick Books, 1982), 112-113.

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the epithet sit R c (daughter of Ra) shows her genetic link to Ra which is why
her influence is seen throughout all creation. Ra sails across the sky in the
sacred barque which is often seen as being guided by Maat.22From the sacred
barque, Ra governs the world, bringing it light. In fact, this light, a communi­
cation and manifestation of divine energy and order, was Maat. For the de­
ceased, this sacred barque is also symbolic of crossing to the abode of the
blessed. This provides some insight into the use of the sickle-shaped end of
the w ii bark (_>).
As indicated above, the symbol ( = ) has been the source of some schol­
arly debate. Champollion, the most successful early translator of the Kemetic
language, sees this symbol as a coudee egyptienne (an Egyptian cubit).23
Assmann asserts that Champollion’s interpretation attempted to link Maat to
the Greek concept of kanon and the corresponding Latin concept of regula,
two concepts that are defined as ruler, yet metaphorically extend to notions of
character in terms of rules of conduct and standards of excellence.24 Gardiner
tentatively sees this symbol as a pedestal or platform,25 but the consensus
among most scholars seems to see in the symbol the idea of the primeval hill.
S. Grumach claims that it is “a hill symbolizing the rise of vegetation from the
earth which denotes both the primeval hill and the throne-base.”26Other scholars
would concur with this analysis, adding that this physical and unchanging
ground or foundation of all life is symbolically extended to convey at once the
ruler’s throne and thus the right to rule and notions of uprightness, levelness,
and straightness.27Brunner is the foremost scholar who championed the inter­
pretation of this symbol at the throne-base extending to notions of justice, and
22. Ra had two sacred barques, the Mandjet, the day barque, and the Mesektet, the night
barque. As guider of the sacred barque of Ra, Maat is consistent with its root mic in the sense of
to lead, guide, direct and steer. See Faulkner, A Concise Dictionary o f Middle Egyptian, 102.
23. P.A.A. Boeser, “The hieroglyph = ” in Studies Presented to E LI. Griffith
(London: Oxford University, Press, 1932).
24. Jan Assmann, M a’at: Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit in Alten Aegyten (Munchen:
Verlag C. H. Beck, 1990), 16; Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon: Founded Upon the
Seventh Edition o f Liddell and Scotts Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “kanon.”
25. See (Aa 11) and (Aa 12) in Sir Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar: Being an
Introduction to the Study o f Hieroglyphs, 3d edition (London: Oxford University Press,
1957), 541. Boeser sees this symbol as being akin to a pedestal or platform, preferring to
label it a “terrace with a step.” See Boeser, “The hieroglyph = . ” '
26. Irene Shirun-Grumach, “Remarks on the Goddess Maat” in Pharaonic Egypt: The
Bible and Christianity, ed. Sarah Israelit-Groll (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew
University, 1985), 174.
27. See Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion, trans. by Ann E. Keep (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­
versity Press, 1994), 113; John A. Wilson, “Egypt” in The Intellectual Adventure o f Ancient
Man, Henri Frankfort et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 108-109; Vincent
Tobin, “Maat and Dike: Some Comparative Considerations of Egyptian and Greek Thought,”
Journal o f the American Research Center in Egypt XXIV (1987): 115; Maulana

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Assmann has implied that it is biblically inspired.28Certainly, this “biblische

Wendung” in interpretation, as Assmann calls it, necessitates a critical look at
this symbol from an alternative African-centered perspective.
Following Bleeker, Grumach sees this symbol ( = ) as being interchange­
able with this symbol ( = ) which Bleeker sees as a “measured piece of land.”29
For Gardiner, this symbol ( = ) is a garden pool,30not a measured piece of land.
Gardiner notes that this symbol ( = ) is the Old Kingdom form of this symbol
(=■), but he does not claim that this Old Kingdom form is interchangeable
with what he calls the garden pool ( = ) . If this symbol ( = ) is seen as being
interchangeable with this symbol (=■), it could also speak to the possibility of
reference to the ordered primeval waters of the first time.31Carruthers informs
us that “the time before the beginning is thus, a set of eternal mandates which
direct the basic parameters of that which came into being. The act of creation
is, thus, not an arbitrary action; it is ordered by a preexisting state or condition
which again is not chaos, but the source of sources of the beginning.”32 The
possibility that this symbol ( = ) could, at once, refer to this ordered, preexist­
ing state and the primeval hill does not seem to be a contradiction or inconsis­
tency, especially when we know these ideas, in harmony with a fundamental
belief among African people, do not assume a split between the spiritual and
material aspects of reality. In fact, in the Kemetic language there is no gener­
alized concept of matter in the abstract. A more appropriate way to convey
this notion is to say that there were physical manifestations of a spiritual
reality because all that exists possesses spirit. Maat, then, could refer to the
orderly process of creation and the primeval hill—a visible object that is at
once its solid self and a manifestation of a preexisting cosmic and spiritual order.
When Nun, the primeval waters that filled the universe, subsided, the
primeval hill appeared where Atum-Ra comes forth and creates himself. Atum-
Ra came forth from the primeval hill, the place of creation, after Maat was in
place. This context is extremely imperative to understand because what is
important is the cosmic relationship that the primeval hill symbolizes, not its
physical form and substance. The primeval hill cannot be perceived of as sepa­
rate, foreign, nor merely loosely connected to the primeval waters. The primeval
waters can actually be seen as the spiritual, intrinsic, activating force of
Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study of Classical African Ethics,” vol. 1
(Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1994), 7-8.
28. Assmann, Maat, 16. .
29. C. J. Bleeker, DeBeteekenis van de Egyptische Godin Maat (Leiden, 1929), 10,
quoted in “Remarks on the Goddess Maat,” Irene Shirun-Grumach, 173-174.
30. See (fit. 37) in Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 491.
31. Richard H. Wilkinson, Reading Egyptian Art (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.,
1992), 137.
32. Carruthers, Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies, 61-62.

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the primeval hill. Consequently, the primeval hill is a concrete, physical sym­
bol that conveys the idea of Maat as a spiritual and cosmic force that at once
precedes and is part of the creation of the universe.
Moreover, Maat is symbolic of the divine energy in the universe that
sustains and maintains the relationship between unseen cosmic forces and
physical realities. African cultures comprehensively assume that unseen cos­
mic forces serve as a foundation of movements of coming to be and ceasing to
be. Because of this assumption, the invisible aspect of a physical reality is
equally as real, if not more real than the visible aspect of it. Thus, for the
Kemites, the physical reality of the primeval hill is not only a reality in the
visible realm, it is also a reality in the invisible realm. The primeval hill can
exist only in combination with the primeval waters. If there were no primeval
waters, there would be no primeval hill. Whereas the two are distinct from
each other, the former is that by which the latter is. Because this is such a key
symbol in interpreting the breadth and depth of Maat, it is a grave conceptual
error to continue to view this symbol in a limited physical sense and thereby
marginalize its deeper spiritual implications. It would seem to be common
sense for the Kemites to see spirit and water in the primeval hill and, thus,
common sense to see Maat as concretely manifesting in the physical realm but
not mistaking this realm as its origin. From this assumption, notions of truth,
justice, balance, and order speak to the quest of being in harmony with what
has always been since Sep Tepy (The First Time).
As Obenga affirms, the egg (t>) has symbolic significance throughout
Africa, and for the Kemites it contains the “breath of life at the dawn of the
world.”33The egg links Maat not only to conceptions of the beginning of the
world, but also to everything that will be created in the future. The egg, as the
germ of life and movement, speaks to the inexhaustible dynamism of life and
Maat’s applicability to life as a holistic phenomenon. Obenga states that the
egg is a symbol “of wholeness, of perfection, of integrity, purity, of youth and
of life.”34
The ostrich feather (jl)3S worn on her head was often shown indepen­
dently as her emblem as in the “weighing of the heart” scene in the Book o f
33. Thdophile Obenga, “African Philosophy of the Pharaonic Period,” Egypt Revisited,
Journal o f African Civilizations 10 (Summer 1989): 300.
34. Ibid., 301.
35. The symbol of the feather is also used to refer to the air god Shu. Even though the
feather is an attribute of both, Maat is more often linked with Tefnut rather than Shu, who sepa­
rated the sky (Nut) from the earth (Geb). For an interesting discussion on linking Shu with
Maat through their “mythological activity” in the “Coffin Texts,” resulting in the possibility of
Maat being also seen as an air goddess, see Shirun-Grumach, ‘Remarks on die Goddess Maat"
Another interesting avenue of research relates to the unusual occurrence of multiple feathers
(i.e., two or four) linked to Maat in various funerary papyri between the XIX and XXI Dynas-

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Coming Forth By Day, commonly known as the Book o f the Dead. Here, the
feather as a symbol of truth is weighed against the heart of the deceased. If the
heart were weighed against the feather as a physical specimen, the scales would
never be balanced.*36 Hence, the heart is metaphor for a person’s will and de­
sire to be in harmony with Maat which is reflected in behavior and conduct.
The heart, being in harmony with Maat, reflects the moral and spiritual wor­
thiness necessary to enter the abode of the blessed. It is important to note that
a person’s behavior and conduct, both in the context of society and the “after­
life,” were not evaluated by a prescribed system of laws or “Commandments,”
but by how far it conformed with Maat.37
As Maat’s sacred symbol, the ostrich feather intimately links Kemet
with the other African nations of Punt, which the Kemites referred to as the
“Land of the Gods,” and Nubia, not only in terms of trade, but also in the
feather’s shared cultural significance by all as a sacred symbol.38 It is not an
accident that the ostrich is the “first species of bird for which we have picto­
(i.e., two or four) linked to Maat in various funerary papyri between the XIX and XXI Dynas­
ties, indicative of the subtle transformations in iconography taking place in the New Kingdom,
especially under the reign of Akhenaten. See Emily Teeter, “Multiple Feathers and Maat,” Bul­
letin o f the Egyptological Seminar 7 (1985/86): 43-52.
36. Obenga, Icons o f Maat, 48. n.
37. The Kemites did have hp, “law,” and judicial officials were often caSMj)m -n tr M3 ’r>
“priest of Maat,” lit. “God’s servant of Maat.” This title is an indication of the spiritual unpor-
tance of law, and notice too the absence of the indirect genitive n “o f’ in the epithet, a further
indication of the priest’s importance in upholding Maat. “The Eloquent Peasant” affirms that
“rightly filled justice neither falls short nor brims over.” See Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Lit­
erature, vol. 1,179. This is an indication that law in Kemet was not equivalent to the zero-sum
political and emotional circus that it is reduced to in the West. The goal was to create harmony,
not rigid winners and losers. Carruthers states that “conflicts of interest were handled through
litigation of private individuals and groups rather than through politics among constitutionally
or philosophically based power groups.” See Jacob H. Carruthers, “The Wisdom of Governance
in Kemet” in Kemet and the African Worldview: Research, Rescue, and Restoration, ed.
Maulana Katenga and Jacob Carruthers (Los Angeles: The University of Sankore Press, 1986), 4.
In a similar vein, Ward claims that “there was a certain justice in this procedure since every
case was in some way different from any other and the individual could feel that a verdict was
rendered on the basis of the pertinent circumstances and not in conformance with some imper­
sonal code of written laws.” See William Ward, The Spirit o f Ancient Egypt (Beirut: Khayats,
1965), 161.
38. Chancellor Williams, The Destruction o f Black Civilization (Chicago: Third World
Press, 1991), 79; Patrick F. Houlihan, The Birds o f Ancient Egypt (Cairo: The American Uni­
versity in Cairo Press, 1988), 4; Berthold Laufer, Ostrich Egg-shell Cups o f Mesopotamia and
the Ostrich in Ancient and Modem Times, Anthropology Leaflet 23 (Chicago: Field Museum of
Natural History, 1926), 16. For a tribute from Punt received by the vizier Rekhmire at Thebes
that includes ostrich eggs and feathers among other items, see Norman De Garis Davies, The
Tomb ofRekh-mi-re at Thebes (New York: Amo Press, 1973), 17-20, Plate XVII. For a Nubian
tribute, see N. M. Davies, “Nubians in the Tomb of Amunedjeh,” Journal o f Egyptian Archae­
ology 28 (1942): 50-52.

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 A frican W orld H istory P roject— P reliminary C hallenge

rial evidence from Egypt.”39It not only squarely places Kemetic origins in the
South, but it also speaks to their shared cultural universe because ostrich feathers
and eggs were always primary items that were brought north to Kemet from
the south. From antiquity to contemporary times, the ostrich feather remains
a significant sacred symbol among many African cultures.40
The papyrus rolled up, tied, and sealed (=^=) speaks both to Maat’s rela­
tionship to writing and to what Carruthers refers to as “deep thought”41 Oddly
enough, the issue of whether or not Kemites were capable of deep, abstract
thought has been raised by a number of scholars. Tobin claims that the Ke­
mites gave “concrete expression to an abstract reality. Unlike the later Greek,
the Egyptians had not yet developed the intellectual ability to think in ab­
stract terms.”42Mercer, in line with Tobin, assures us that “the Egyptians never
became abstract thinkers. Their script is sufficient evidence for that. They
always felt the need of expressing themselves in concrete terms.”43
The underlying assumption is reflective of the cultural judgment of
Kemetic thought as merely a routine, unthinking activity juxtaposed against
the pioneering, rational Greeks. Despite the pejorative tenor of this particular
assessment, what these scholars really reveal is that Kemet does not fit into
the cultural paradigm of the Near Eastern world. Ani rightly states “that in all
societies and cultures people must abstract from experience in order to orga­
nize themselves, to build and to create and to develop. Abstraction has its
place. It is not a European cognitive tool (methodology), but a ‘human’ one.”44
39. Houlihan, The Birds o f Ancient Egypt, 1. It is also important to point out that the
ostrich is technically known as Struthio camelus in Western taxonomy, words having Greek
and Roman roots meaning “sparrow camel.” Thus, the ostrich was seen as being part bird and
part mammal to the Greeks and Romans. See John Pollard, Birds in Greek Life and Myth
(Plymouth: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 86; An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon:
Founded Upon the Seventh Edition o f Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, s.v.
“Struthio camelus.” For the Kemites, the ostrich was called niw. It is not a mere coincidence
that the phonetic and ideographic representation of the primeval waters in the Old Kingdom
Pyramid Texts is also niw, exactly matching the Old Kingdom Pyramid Text writing for the
ostrich, the only difference being an ideogram of an ostrich placed at the end of niw to serve
as a determinative. Hence, the ostrich seemed to remind the Kemites of the primeval waters.
This provides even stronger support for the above analysis linking Maat to both the primeval
hill and the primeval waters! See (G 34) and (W 24) in Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 470,
530. See Appendix B for an analysis using Dogon cosmology to further understand the
connection between the ostrich and the primeval waters.
40. Obenga, Icons o f Maat, 85-92.
41. See Jacob Carruthers, Mdw Nff: Divine Speech (London: Kamak House, 1995).
42. Vincent Arieh Tobin, “Mytho-Theology in Ancient Egypt,” Journal o f the
American Research Center in Egypt XXV (1988): 169.
43. Samuel A.B. Mercer, Growth o f Religious and Moral Ideas in Egypt (Milwaukee:
Morehouse Publishing Co., 1919), 20.
44. Marimba Ani, Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique o f European Cultural
Thought and Behavior (Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, Inc., 1994), 71.

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Yet Kemetic abstract, deep thought could at once reveal spiritual, moral, intel­
lectual, scientific, and artistic knowledge without separation. The fundamen­
tal African assumption of unity between the Creator, nature, and people is
alien to Western thought. For the Kemites, the relationship between things
thought, things felt, things spoken, and things done was dynamic. Hence, speak­
ing Maat and doing Maat were informed by divine law and order; it was not a
mere theory to explain practice. Theories can change, but Maat was immu­
table. In the West, law, the embodiment of truth, justice, and order, is essen­
tially seen as the regulation of self-interest and is enforced by threat of
punishment. Truth then, being predicated on the regulation of the selfish I
mentality, becomes an arbitrary and inevitable by-product of the denial of any
primary divine, moral order in the universe. For Kemites, Maat was reflective
of a person’s relationship to both a social order and a cosmic order. This we
mentality made it unnecessary to appeal to a particular law in order to judge
whether or not one’s behavior was true and just.45Yet, just individually doing
anything was not practice, nor was it Maat. Individuals had a responsibility in
preserving and perpetuating the social order and the cosmic order and the
sacredness of this felt obligation was based on a common frame of reference
and a common understanding of the essential significance of Maat which was
not relative or individually arbitrary.
It is important to reiterate that the above different writings of Maat are
variations of the same substance, not different substances. While Maat’s es­
sence is always recognized, particular facets could be highlighted and empha­
sized depending upon the context and/or situation. The determinatives do not
just provide us with clues to understanding the specific semantic intent. Within
Maat, the determinatives also represent the transformation and transference
of an unchanged, indestructible cosmic energy in the universe. Hence, saying
that feature x of Maat is important is not to claim that x is its complete essence
or ultimate nature. The notions of truth, justice, harmony, righteousness, and
universal order hugged and kissed one another in Kemetic thought and could
not be usefully separated.

Maat
The Problematic of Framework and Interpretation
There are different intellectual pictures of Maat that serve different purposes.
Whether or not a scholar’s interest is in religion, ethics, rhetoric, or social
systems, it inevitably impacts the interpretation of Maat. Granted, no single
description or explanation can exhaust the meaning of Maat. The fundamental
question of allegiance must be considered if this concept is to benefit the res-
45. Ward, The Spirit o f Ancient Egypt, 162.

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toration of African history, the process of African nation-building, and the

contemporary African struggle against the steamrolling onslaught of Western
culture. In his monumental work on Maatian ethics, Maulana Karenga states
that “an interpreter of a tradition text contributes to building the tradition by
his/her very interpretation.”461 would amend this to say that “building the
tradition” does not take place in a vacuum; therefore, every interpreter does
not build the African tradition. Indeed, some interpretations of Maat are to be
seen as inimical to this project.
Theoretical frameworks are based on fundamental assumptions about
the world. At the heart of interpreting Maat seems to lie the issue of how
should truth from the past relate to and interact with the historical dimensions
of the present and the future. This dynamic can result in a situation where
Maat is used as a disguise to mask and obscure the creation of a new system of
truth, rather than as a cultural and historical extension of an old one. In locat­
ing the interpretation of scholars, these interests that are incorporated in the
interpretation of Maat must be revealed. Some scholars, usually African, are
honest relative to this issue, and others, usually European, require a very close
read in order to unmask their veiled subjectivity. There are five key issues
revolving around the interpretation of Maat that have been the source of de­
bate, albeit essentially silent:

1) What theoretical framework is most beneficial to interpret

Maat: religion, ethics or some other framework?

2) Is Maat reflective of an / mentality that fundamentally val­

ues the individual or is it fundamentally reflective o f the
we mentality which places a primary value on the com­
munity?

3) Is Maat reflective of a society that was class-based where

the ruling class, especially the king, constructed notions of
truth, justice, and order to cement their status, or is Maat a
divine concept, reflective of an essentially egalitarian soci­
ety, where each person had a role in the society to preserve
and perpetuate Maat and the king in this regard had a di- '
vine role?

4) Does Maat reflect a society that was optimistic or pessimis­

tic about human nature and the future?
46. Karenga self-consciously takes the study of Maatian ethics out of the realm of Egyp­
tology and attempts to revitalize it in order to speak to modem ethical discourse. See Maulana
Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt,” vol. II, 752,755.

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5) Is Maat, fundamental to Kemetic civilization, to be

contextualized within the cultural matrix of the Near East/
Mediterranean or Africa or some combination of the two?

Although Maat has been discussed in sundry ways, most frequently it

has been discussed within the context of religion. The notable exceptions to
this are primarily found in the work of African scholars such as Thdophile
Obenga, Jacob Carruthers, Molefi Kete Asante, and Maulana Karenga although
each approaches this task in different ways. We have already referred to
Karenga’s recent dissertation on Maatian ethics that stands alongside Jan
Assmann’s work,47published in the German language, as the most descriptive
and authoritative treatments of Maat. Indeed, the interpretation of Maat from
these two scholars is essential in addressing the above queries.
For Assmann, the concept of religion is merely a sociological cloak for
managing reality and a rationale of the class-based social and economic or­
der.48A concept that provides some cursory insight into his theoretical frame­
work is connective justice which means “if an action implies violation of a
law, then as a consequence there will be a penalty. The nexus between crime
and penalty is to be defined by jurisdiction and to be enacted by judiciary and
executive institutions, i.e. by society and the state.”49 Since society and the
state become the supreme arbiter of Maat, religion and politics are fused, the
will of the king becomes preeminent, and Maat is stripped of its cosmic and

47. Jan Assmann, Ma 'at: Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im Alten Agypten (Munchen:
Veriag C. H. Beck, 1990). For a somewhat descriptive review of this work, at least theoreti­
cally, see J. Gwyn Griffiths, ‘Translating Ma’at,” The Journal o f Egyptian Archaeology 80
(1994). For an article in English that provides a narrative, albeit essential indication of his theo­
retical framework and inteipretation of Maat, see Jan Assmann, “When Justice Fails:
Jurisdiction and Imprecation in Ancient Egypt and the Near East,” The Journal o f Egyptian Ar­
chaeology 78 (1992).
48. Because I have found only one article published by Jan Assmann in English, I have
purposely kept my critique to a minimum although it is reflective of his basic position.
Maulana Karenga also has a critique of Assmann in his dissertation. See Karenga, “Maat, The
Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt,” vol. II, 486-494. There are some scholars, like Morenz, who
recognize some of the problems with the concept of religion, but because he uses it, he implies
the benefits outweigh the problems. He is more accurate than Assmann in his treatment of Maat
in recognizing, among other things, that “the perception of maat and divine instruction or inspi­
ration belong together.” See Morenz, Egyptian Religion, 3-4,124. John A. Wilson, although
contrary to Assmann’s position, still distorts Maat by viewing it as a kind of suprareligious con­
cept that was difficult in its practical application to people’s lives. He states that, “but justice,
Maat, was of the gods and of the divine order; it was not easy for the goddess Maat to find her
home among ordinary men.” See John A. Wilson, The Culture o f Ancient Egypt (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1960), 143.
49. Assmann, “When Justice Fails,” 150.

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divine significance. Maat then becomes reflective of an institution of expedi­

ency and justice becomes an arbitrary activity whose object is immediate ad­
vantage in the goods of this world rather than the upholding and maintaining
of societal harmony.50 Since necessity is the mother of invention, Maat seems
to provide two fundamental things in Assmann’s framework, one being a jus­
tification and legitimation of state interests and the other being spiritual com­
pensation for more tangible, material needs.
Assmann’s view projects such an unadulterated European materialism
into an African concept that it even becomes plausible to see Kemet as a mani­
festation of the Northern Cradle51 and indeed this is shown, in part, through
his attempt to understand Maat within the context of the cultural universe of
the Near East. Karenga challenges, head on, Assmann’s portrayal of Maat as
reflective of a society that assumes human nature is evil and masks an internal
class struggle that is put in check by the state.52 Karenga rightly asserts that
the king’s role in upholding Maat is a cosmic role, not just an earthly one, and
because of this, Assmann’s negligence is apparent in delinking Maat from its
primordial significance.53 For Karenga, Maat assumes the good in human na­
ture and points to “the triumph of the good,”54 in stark contrast to the evil
assumed by Assmann. In addition, Maat is “pre-eminently other-directed,
communitarian and humanistic.”55
In his framework, Karenga self-consciously dispenses with the concept
of religion in discussing Maat and opts for the concept of ethics. The concept
o f ethics seems to provide him with the conceptual latitude to do a num­
ber of things:

50. Although not explicitly talking about Maat, Eric Carlton makes a similar analysis of
Kemetic society. Although much of the work is devoted to analyzing the social order of Kemet,
his theoretical framework and point of view are encapsuled in the chapter entitled “Compara­
tive Typologies: Egypt and Athens.” See B ic Carlton, Ideology and Social Order (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
51. For Cheikh Anta Diop, the Northern Cradle included Germany, Greece, Rome, and
Crete. For Diop, the historically cold and harsh environment and geographical location of these
nations influenced their cultural disposition, yielding values such as individualism, xenophobia,
and patriarchy among others. See Cheikh Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity o f Black Africa: The
Domains o f Patriarchy and Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (Chicago: Third World Press,
1990), 72.
52. Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt,” vol. II, 486.
53. Ibid., 491-492. John A. Wilson submits an analysis in harmony with Assmann’s,
claiming Maat “was a created and inherited rightness which tradition built up into a concept of
orderly stability in order to confirm and consolidate the status quo, particularly the continuing
rule of the pharaoh.” See John A. Wilson, The Culture o f Ancient Egypt, 48.
54. Ibid., 494.
55. Ibid., 493.

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1) Maatian ethics, as distinct from religious ethics, restores a

classical African tradition and poses a contemporary para­
digm of human possibility that is not incarcerated by rigid
theology.56

2) Maatian ethics enables him to interpret Kemetic thought “in

terms of their professed or ascribed intentions.”57

3) Maatian ethics allows him to discuss both the philosophical

conception and ideal of Kemetic society and the human prac­
tice needed to achieve it.58

4) The goal of his work is to construct a contemporary, nonre­

ligious ethical system along the lines of Confucianism that
is able to not only be of use for African people, but speak to
modem moral discourse and function as a “cultural para­
digm for the surrounding world,”59even as he claims Kemet
did in antiquity.

Karenga rightly admits that the classification of Maatian ethics into cat­
egories such as ontology and theology is “more implicit than explicit,”60 yet
there are still a number of concerns that need to be raised. In his quest to
create an ethical system based on the Maatian tradition that all human beings
can aspire to, Karenga implicitly advocates more permeable boundaries be­
tween African traditions and other human traditions, but in the process he
avoids making certain distinctions between cultures which are important. One
concern here is his apparent intellectual reflex to attempt to understand Maat
in terms of Confucianism.61 Because Confucianism attaches great dignity to
human moral capacity and is viewed as a major nonreligious ethical system in
the world, it is clear that Confucianism becomes a major source of inspiration
for Karenga’s reconstruction of Maatian ethics. In fact, he implies that Tao, a

56. Ibid., 557.

57. Maulana Karenga, “Towards a Sociology of Maatian Ethics: Literature and Context,”
in Reconstructing Kemetic Culture: Papers, Perspectives, Projects, ed. Maulana Karenga (Los
Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1990), 67.
58. Ibid.,.87.
59. Ibid., 68.
60. Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt,” vol. II, 402.
61. This dynamic is mainly existent in his article on Maatian ethics and it only seems to
enter his dissertation when he has extracted passages from the article.

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key concept in understanding Confucianism, provides the closest philosophi­

cal parallel to Maat.®
Just as Confucianism is a virtue-oriented system consisting of four car­
dinal virtues: righteousness (yi), propriety (/i), wisdom (chih), and benevo­
lence (/en),6263 so too has Karenga combed the Kemetic tradition for cardinal
virtues and he cites seven: truth, justice, propriety, harmony, balance, reci­
procity, and order.64 Just as Lau implies that Confucius “realizes that in the
last resort yi is the standard by which all acts must be judged while there is no
further standard by which yi itself can be judged,”65 so too does Karenga sub­
sume all cardinal virtues under the rubric of righteousness.66
My claim is not that African people have a monopoly on knowledge.
But to claim that Maat is akin to Confucianism is not only an analysis, it is a
claim that these two systems are essentially equivalent. Thus, Confucianism
becomes a salient ethical system that African people can aspire to, at least in
its essence. What Karenga does not do is present what is deeply troublesome
and problematic about this equivalency. A major issue is summed up by Lau:

Unlike religious teachers, Confucius could hold out no hope

of rewards either in this world or in the next. As far as sur­
vival after death is concerned, Confucius’ attitude can, at
best, be described as agnostic. When Tzu-lu asked how gods
and spirits of the dead should be served, the Master answered
that as he was not able even to serve man how could he
serve the spirits, and when Tzu-lu further asked about death,
the Master answered that as he did not understand even life
how could he understand death.67

Herein, Confucius clearly affirms the impossibility to know God, the

spiritual world, or anything beyond material phenomena. This is in stark con­
trast to any fundamental African cultural belief. For me, then, Karenga’s com­
parative analysis of Maatian and Confucian ethics loses its potency and indeed
becomes strained because the above quotation helps to contextualize Confu­
cian ethics which Karenga overlooks in his metaphorical treatment.

62. Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt,” vol. 1 ,16.
63. Bongkil Chung, “The Relevance of the Confucian Ethics,” Journal o f Chinese Phi­
losophy 18 (1991): 146.
64. Karenga, “Towards a Sociology of Maatian Ethics,” 90.
65. Confucius, The Analects, trans. with an Introduction by D. C. Lau (New York: Pen­
guin Books, 1988), 27.
66. Karenga, “Towards a Sociology of Maatian Ethics,” 90-91.
67. Lau, Analects, 12.

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Karenga’s hope for the application of Maat in the modem world is akin
to Chung’s hope for Confucianism. Chung believes that if Confucianism “is
not revitalized as moral norms for the world it can be no more than a
philosopher’s plaything.” The major problem with this is the concept of virtue
has to be individually centered to carry out this mission and thereby downplay
the implications resulting from the cultural universe that produced it. There is
a tension between the inherent cultural nationalism that concepts like Maat
and Tao are expressions of and the modem quest to present these concepts to
humanity, transcending their cultural framework. Both Karenga and Chung
seem to be aware of these issues.68 For me, this dynamic raises a number
o f queries. Can African people liberate themselves without liberating
Europeans? Is it necessary for African people to use their concepts to save
Europeans from themselves and others and thereby save ourselves in the
process? Can African concepts cajole Europeans away from using their thought
and practice to preserve and perpetuate their world domination, particularly in
light of the fact that although this domination is contemporary, the “patterns
for interpreting reality” that fuel it spawned in antiquity? My position is that
Maat must not be reduced to some type of amorphous Aristotelian notion
of the “Supreme Good” that is equivalent to equating the ultimate goals of
African resistance as being in harmony with the European concept of nation­
state. This type of “Supreme Good” logic results in African people asking
how can I be a better American as opposed to how can I be a better African
and how can I commit to promoting what is in the best interest of African
people worldwide.69
Since culture provides people with “a design for living and patterns for
interpreting reality,” Confucian ethics, at the very least, is unwarranted as a
primary metaphor in Karenga’s analysis without providing some sense of Chi­
nese patterns for interpreting reality so that we are able to better appreciate
both the congruency and incongruency between the two.
While Karenga reconstructs Maat as a virtue-oriented ethical system,
Obenga discusses Maat in the context of “spheres of reality” (the sacred, the
cosmos, the state, the society, and man) with “five dimensions of significance”
(religious, cosmic, political, social, and anthropological). This framework for
interpreting Maat is a kind of cosmic permutation whereby all of the “dimen­
sions of significance” are interconnected and are also inextricably linked to
all “spheres of reality.”70 In Obenga’s words, “Maat includes the sum total of
68. See Chung, “The Relevance of the Confucian Ethics,” 143,145; Karenga, “Maat, The
Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt,” vol. II, 641-646.
69. For Aristotle’s comment on the “Supreme Good,” see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,
trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5-6.
70. In this regard, Obenga concurs with Assmann’s general categories and aspects in

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experience, knowledge, and activity, including such areas as all of the sci­
ences, theology (the Sacred), cosmology (the Cosmos), political science (the
State), sociology (the society), and anthropology (human beings). Maat wove
all of these pieces of reality into a well-matched globality.”71Just as Karenga’s
scholarly innovation to expand the conceptual boundaries of Maat to include
notions of harmony, balance, propriety, and reciprocity, which have not been
normally linked to Maat, so too does Obenga push the conceptual boundaries
forward by simply translating Maat as reality in all of its manifestations, spiri­
tual and material.72 Notice, too, the clear distinction between Obenga’s and
Assmann’s framework. Whereas Assmann begins his discussion of Maat with
the state and society, Obenga implies that the state and society cannot be un­
derstood without reference to the sacred and cosmic dimensions of reality.
Carruthers, in harmony with Obenga and Karenga, stresses the cosmic
foundation and ethical manifestation of Maat as “universal order.”73 He says
that “Maat is the principle of balance in the universe whether that balance
refers to weights and measurements in the market, law in the courts, judgment
of the heart of the dead, or the universal cosmological patterns.”74Seeing Maat
as being inextricably linked to the “African universe,” the importance of his
framework lies more in its bold vision. He initiates the call for African schol­
ars to abandon the concepts of religion, ethics, political science, and the like
when discussing African reality because these frameworks not only constrict
how we think about African reality, but they also provide the African scholar
with tools to further escape from dealing with African deep thought.75 His
describing the scope of Maat, although he would not elevate the state order above the cosmic
and social order and thereby imply that the populace was dependent on the state which arbi­
trarily dispensed Maat. See Obenga, Icons o f Maat, 96; Assmann, Maat, 38. The reader should
keep in mind that the reason Obenga must delineate so many “spheres of reality” in describing
Maat has more to do with trying to fit a sacred African concept into a Western epistemological
order that is driven by the secularization of reality more so than it is an accurate reflection of
Kemetic thought.
71. Obenga, Icons o f Maat, 77.
72. In a private conversation that took place on July 30,1996, Thdophile Obenga revealed
the following: “I say Maat is reality because Maat is perfect already. It cannot be changed nor
debated. Western Civilization takes a different philosophical path in conceptualizing reality
which is why reality tends to be questioned and abstracted to the point where it becomes di­
vorced from people’s lives. You cannot do any more than perfection which is why the force of
Maat was concretely felt in the movement of the sun, the moon, and the celestial bodies down
to the everyday lives of the people. Maat was not limited to the relationship between the Cre­
ator and the person and the moral expectations among people. Maat was a divine force that
encompassed and embraced everything existing and alive. Today, Western Civilization has cre­
ated technology such as nuclear weapons that are actually against reality.”
73. Carruthers, Mdw Nlr: Divine Speech, 56.
74. Carruthers, Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies, 58.
75. Ibid., 114; Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech, 54.

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self-conscious labeling of Maat as “the African universe”76 seems to reflect

this call and also stresses the fundamental importance of the cultural unity of
Africa and the need to uncover the underlying unity of African deep thought
through time and space.
Molefi Kete Asante attempts to view Maat largely within the confines
of the concept of rhetoric which he defines as a “theory of authoritative utter­
ance.”77 Although Asante accurately claims that in Kemetic society “it was
considered ‘right’ to maintain unity o f heart and tongue, conviction and
speech,”78 the use of the term rhetoric mystifies rather than clarifies this dy­
namic. As commonly understood, rhetoric is essentially a Western individual­
istic concept where deception is taken for granted and is excusable and
justifiable at all times. Rhetoric does not have to be truthful; its primary aim is
to persuade, impress, and blur the lines between truth and falsehood.79 More­
over, the concept of rhetoric is philosophically and morally unequipped to
interpret a civilization that existed in relative peace and stability for almost
three thousand years without rigid legal codes that came with the advent of
Persian domination. Hence Maat, contrary to rhetoric, was indicative and re­
flective of a stable and reassuring cosmic and social order.
For Asante, Maat is a “social, ethical, and rhetorical term.”80Maat inex­
tricably links the universe, nature, and the person together in a cosmic union
that must be preserved and reinforced.81 Like Obenga, Asante sees Maat as
“the fundamental reality,”82 yet he misses a critical point when he claims that
Maat is “not a worldview but more correctly a world voice.”83We know Maat
speaks from a specific world view, an African world view. To define Maat as a
world voice cannot take precedence over the African world view. If there is an
essential transcultural and transpersonal world voice which is capable of be-
76. Ibid., 44.
77. Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, 80.
78. Ibid., 82.
79. In describing the process of the “secularization of speech” in Ancient Greece whereby
myth gives way to rational thought, Detienne claims that this process was intimately tied to the
emergence of the notions of rhetoric, philosophy, law, and history. He asserts that “the aim of
sophistry like rhetoric, is persuasion (peitho), trickery (apate). In a fundamentally ambiguous
world, these mental techniques allowed the domination of men through the power of ambiguity
itself,” See Marcel Detienne, The Masters o f Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New
York: Zone Books, 1996), 104,118. In a similar analysis, Hinks states that “probability, even
while possessing the authority of a working approximation to truth, has in the eyes of the so­
phistic, rhetorician a still greater advantage, that one can argue from it independently of truth.”
See D. A. G. Hinks, “Trsias and Corax and the Invention of Rhetoric,” The Classical Quarterly
XXXIV (1940): 63.
80. Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, 83.
81. Ibid., 90.
82. Ibid., 95.
83. Ibid., 98.

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ing treated independently, this position must be the outcome of system­

atic cultural comparison; it cannot be postulated a priori.
LikeKarenga,Asante views the notion of righteousness as being central
to Maat, yet he clarifies that “one cannot be righteous, it is a continuous pro­
cess by which we align ourselves with the harmony we find in nature. Thus,
righteousness is processional and when we say ‘be righteous’ we only mean it
as a process for the moment, for the particular context.”84This position does
not seem to be in harmony with the Kemetic mentality, at least not grammati­
cally when we note that m V is a verbal adjective meaning (to be) true, just,
righteous and the epithet m V hrw (to be) true of voice, frequently evoked by
the deceased also has this same quality. Without a life in harmony with Maat,
no remembrance is possible. Thus, to be righteous is not a static character trait
denoting absolute perfection, so it does not have to negate the process or be
seen as separate from it. If being righteous were solely a process for the mo­
ment, Maat could easily be reduced to arbitrary individual interpretation
and thereby lose its essential quality and importance for the society that felt
the power of Maat in every aspect of their lives and environment.
The strength of Asante’s framework for Maat lies, as he admits, more in
his methodological direction than description. He takes five Kemetic terms
and attempts to apply them metaphorically to African life and culture for the
purpose of illuminating a “Maatic response to injustice and disorder in the
world.”85 Under the rubric of tep (beginning) are love of children, late wean­
ing, age-grouping, and value fertility. Pet (extensions) consists of society above
individual, extended family, and honor to ancestors. Agricultural rites, art for
ritual, dance/music, gift-giving, ceremony for passages, and ululations fall
under heb (festival). Burial, extended funeral, and living ancestors illuminate
sen (circle). And meh (crowning glory) consists of the supreme deity, search
for harmony (Maat), and freedom from shame.86 It is unique and creative in
its attempt to link Maat to the totality of the person’s life cycle while suggest­
ing key African themes that speak to the metaphorical use of these Kemetic
concepts. This framework, although having more descriptive personal impli­
cations than Obenga’s, essentially seeks to also reveal the contours and nu­
ances of what reality means for African people. Putting more flesh on the bare
bones of this framework in terms of operationalizing these notions should •
prove helpful in revealing a critical aspect of Maat.
It is important to note that the above African scholars would be united
against any interpretation of Maat as being reflective of a society that reflects
a pessimistic view of life that primarily values the individual and is class-
84. Ibid., 84.
85. Ibid., 93.
86. Ibid., 93-94.

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based. In addition to the views of Assmann discussed above, Mercer implies a

similar analysis when he claims that Kemetic society was “comparatively back­
ward in moral practice,” possessing a limited idea of the divine and a materi­
alistic outlook on life.87 Wilson, in a similar vein, points to the conquering of
a “feeling of uncertainty and insecurity” as being a major motivating factor
for the creation of Maat.88 Baines sees Maat as a concept that is crucial to
understanding social stratification in Kemet, tentatively divided along the fines
of elites and non-elites. Maat is seen as a concept used by the elites to not only
mask, but to justify their authority and control over the societal institutions
and thus, the populace. The function of Maat was to divert attention from the
inequities in the social order and act as a bulwark against critique. Baines
concludes that “the Egyptians created an attractive but in a sense superficial
public ideology and iconography that concentrated on positive experiences
and ignored the darker side of life or pushed it to the margins of the cosmos.”89
Indeed Assmann, along with Baines, believes Maat points to a society that
tends toward evil and chaos, and both dress an African concept up in Near
Eastern robes mirroring Greek alienation and pessimism.
This brings us full circle to an important query that has a number of
implications. Is Maat to be understood as fundamentally indigenous to the
“African universe” or can Maat, reflective of Kemetic society, be genetically
finked to the “surrounding world” since Kemet functions as an expansive “cul­
tural paradigm?”90 If we combine Karenga’s expansive areas of culture (i.e.
spirituality, history, social organization, economic organization, political or­
ganization, creative motif, and ethos)91 with his definition of paradigm as a
cognitive and practical exemplar used as a model by others “to conceive, ex­
ecute, and substantiate their work,”92 it must be asserted that Kemetic knowl­
edge did not function as a cultural paradigm for the Near East;93 it was a
87. Samuel A. B. Mercer, The Religion o f Ancient Egypt (London: Luzac & Co. Ltd.,
1949), 405.
88. Wilson, The Culture o f Ancient Egypt, 48.
89. John Baines, “Society, Morality, and Religious Practice” in Religion in Ancient
Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1991), 199.
90. Karenga, “Towards a Sociology of Maatian Ethics,” 68.
91. Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies (Los Angeles: The University of
Sankore Press, 1993), 26.
92. Karenga, “Black Studies and the Problematic of Paradigm,” 401.
93. Karenga does understand and appreciate the cultural differences between Kemet and
the Near East. My concern here is that a distinction be made between the concepts of Kemetic
influence and Kemetic cultural paradigm. The concept of influence implies substantial borrow­
ings from Kemetic civilization by the civilizations of the Near East, yet these civilizations
could not borrow the Kemetic world view that produced them. Thus, the Near East used this
knowledge to create essentially new cultural products based on their own cultural paradigm.
Hence, this knowledge is not to be seen as an extension of an African cultural paradigm.

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borrowed and “stolen legacy” stripped out of its cultural context and made to
serve the logic of a European cultural matrix. This is a matter of the utmost
importance, not only for the sake of historical accuracy, but also for the sake
of what Karenga calls “Modem Maatian ethics.”94
The issue seems to be clear: African scholars cannot emphasize Kemet
in order to primarily integrate it into the Near Eastern/Mediterranean cultural
universe and thereby relegate the issue of the cultural unity of Africa to the
back of a research file cabinet of secondary importance. This type of priority
focus subtly detaches Kemet from the cultural unity of Africa even as it praises
its accomplishments. Kemet, and thus Maat, must be used to primarily pro­
vide African people with the cultural and intellectual elbowroom, so to speak,
to carry out Cheikh Anta Diop’s vision of “reconciling African civilizations
with history, in order to be able to construct a body of modem human sci­
ences.”95 The strength of this Pan-African vision is not enhanced by focusing
on the parts of the African world; it is enhanced by unraveling the unifying
threads of African cultural unity through time and space and providing Afri­
can people with a contemporary vision of truth, justice, and universal order
that is, at once, an extension of our shared cultural universe and transcends
our stultifying commitments and allegiance to arbitrary geographical bound­
aries erected by Europeans. For Africans in the United States, this nation-state
boundary coerces us to imagine that we have more in common with Europe­
ans in America than we do with Africans on the African continent. It rein­
forces a false sense of pride, allegiance, and separateness. We cannot allow
these boundaries to infect the vision for the total liberation of African people.
We must conceptually free ourselves from these boundaries so that we can
cultivate the space to develop this “body of modem human sciences,” free of
irrelevant impediments.

94. Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt,” vol. II, 554.
95. Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology (Brooklyn:
Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 3.
 M aat: C ultural and I ntellectual A llegiance of a C oncept

The Vision: M V h rw (M aa Kheru) “To B e

True o f V oice” and M V r h rw (M aa r
Kheru) “To B e Triumphant Over the Enem y”

The wisdom of Ptahhotep is more than sufficient to communicate the essence

of this vision:

Every man teaches as he acts

He will speak to the children
So that they will speak to their children:
Set an example, don’t give offense
If justice stands firm your children will live.96

Notions of truth, justice, righteousness, and universal order reveal both

a cultural design for living and patterns for interpreting reality. Because of
this fact, it is impossible to speak about Maat apart from the African mentality
and world view that spoke this concept into existence. Maat is based on the
African we mentality of interdependence and stresses people’s responsibility
to one another, to the community, to nature, to the Creator, and to the cosmos.
This is in stark contrast to the Western I notion of individual rights. The notion
of rights is based on the assumption of what others owe you; the notion of
responsibility is based on the assumption of what we owe one another. In the
West, concepts such as truth and justice become applicable only in the public
domain when an individual has violated the rights of another individual. And,
of course, in the private domain your own home and your own life is your own
business! This is the schizophrenia of the public/private split in the West. It is
not an accident that ethical questions are primarily raised in the public do­
main; thus, they do not have to impact your way of life like Maat. Nor is it an
accident that, in the West, there is never true moral satisfaction, only moral
outrage, indignation, and complaint! Ivan Van Sertima reminds us that we are
locked in a 500-year room, yet this room must be seen as part and parcel of a
historical and cultural house with a foundation in antiquity. In comparing Maat
and dike, a term that Tobin sees as speaking to the essence of the Greek world

Since m V is grammatically a verbal, I have translated it as (to be) “true of voice” and (to be)
“triumphant over the enemy.” The word m V also can be translated in both words as (to be)
“true, justified, vindicated, and triumphant.” The preposition r “over” lies between m V and
hrw in m V r firw (to be triumphant over the enemy). Although hrw in both words have the
same phonetic value, they are written differently.
96. Zybnek Zaba, Les Maximes de Ptahhotep, line 593-597, p. 62; Lichtheim, Ancient
Egyptian Literature, vol. I, 75.

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 A frican W orld H istory P roject— P reliminary C hallenge

view, he says “with regard to the aspect of justice, maat appears as a benevo­
lent and creative force while dike is essentially negative, being the equivalent
of restraint and punishment.”97He also affirms that “dike does not necessarily
order certain things because they are right; rather things are right and just
solely because they are ordered by dike.”989The logic of this cultural matrix
has not, does not, and cannot yield harmony for African people. For this is the
essential point from which our investigation starts: the germ of truth in West­
ern Civilization lies in man’s unceasing and unadulterated attempt to under­
stand and control people, nature, and ultimately the world. One question that
African people must confront is: Can we continue to expect a harmonious we
mentality from Europeans? A we mentality is something that they have never
shown indeed among themselves and only show it vigorously when they en­
counter the Other." Concepts like multiculturalism provide the veneer of this
we mentality, but in reality they are the essence of dike: “things are right and
just solely because they are ordered.”
Because of the public/private split in the West between the I and the we,
Karenga’s restoration of Maat as a virtue-oriented ethical system involving
truth, justice, propriety, harmony, balance, order, and righteousness becomes
an important component to aid Africans in combating the moral and ethical
atrophy in the West. Karenga stresses Maat as a way of life that can provide
Africans with a set of values, action-guides, and belief-commitments inte­
grated into a holistic unit. Maat is practical and ethical to the extent that it
directly relates to and affects our lives and our vision for African people. Maa
Kheru, being true of voice, was an epithet that was evoked by the deceased to
97. Tobin, “Ma’at and Dike,” 121. In comparing a Greek translation of the Kemetic
phrase “I made what is right strong,” Zabkar asserts that the Greek reduction of Maat to dike in
this phrase “expresses an Egyptian idea in a grecized form” that cannot convey the idea of
Maat properly. See Louis V. Zabkar, Hymns to Isis in Her Temple at Philae (Hanover: Pub­
lished for Brandeis University by University Press of New England, 1988), 153. Even Themis,
the Greek goddess of law, order, and justice, amounts to “interpretatio Graeca” when juxta­
posed against Maat. See A. G. McGready, "Egyptian Words in the Greek Vocabulary,” Glotta
XLVI (1968): 253. The Greeks did not have the cultural universe to support a concept like
Maat which is why Maat resisted translation even in the Greek language. Cheikh Anta Diop
provides us with a keen exposition of why this would be the case. He says that “by virtue of
their materialistic tendencies, the Greeks stripped those inventions of the religious, idealistic
shell in which the Egyptians had enveloped them. On the one hand, the rugged life on the Eur­
asian plains apparently intensified the materialistic instinct of the peoples living there; on the
other hand, it forged moral values diametrically opposite to Egyptian moral values which
stemmed from a collective, sedentary, relatively easy, peaceful life. . . See Cheikh Anta
Diop, The African Origin o f Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook (Chicago:
Lawrence Hill Books, 1974), 230.
98. Ibid., 114.
99. For a descriptive analysis of the Other and how Europeans relate to it, see Ch. 5, “Im­
age of Others,” in Ani, Yurugu, 279-308.

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express the rightness of the whole life of a person, the rightness of the heart,
and the rightness of the accumulated thought, speech, and deeds of a per­
son.100 This shows that Maat could not be merely understood and acknowl­
edged in the abstract, but that it must also be lived! “The Eloquent Peasant”
urges us to “speak justice, do justice for it is mighty, it is great, it endures. Its
worth is tried. It leads one to reveredness.”101Because Maat is enduring, only
the speaking and doing of Maat results in the person being Maa Kheru: true of
voice, justified, triumphant, and worthy of a place in the abode of the blessed.
Because all relationships, whether they be cosmic or social, possess
ethical considerations, Karenga defines virtues as “excellences of human char­
acter which sustain practices which enable persons to achieve various desir­
able goods, but also sustain them in their quest for the good.”102This definition
of virtue, although human-centered, can paradoxically function to cloud the
issue of cultural allegiance. Karenga’s project of situating Maat within the
context of modern ethical discourse essentially means funneling an African
concept through Western virtue-oriented ethical paradigms and terminology.
The idea of transporting Western concepts to African reality seems to distort
our traditions more so than it clarifies them and induces us to mistake Western
ethical discourse for African culture in the process. For example, Karenga
states that “Maatian ethics are not strictly consequentialist in their reasoning
although it is clear that there is a concern for consequences in terms of rela­
tions with God, others, and nature. Moreover, Maatian ethics are reflective of
act consequentialism rather than rule consequentialism.”103Borrowing the con­
cept of consequentialism from modern ethical discourse to say that the ac­
tions of Kemites were generally judged by their consequences, not by
conformity to rigid moral rules, can ironically function to sidestep the funda­
mental issue of culture. Harris states that there are two main types of
consequentialism: egoism and utilitarianism. For him, “egoism holds that ac­
tions are to be judged by the extent to which they promote a person’s self­
interest. Utilitarianism holds that actions are to be judged by the extent to
which they promote the welfare of humanity in general.”104Neither one of
these types of consequentialism is fruitful for discussing the historical and
contemporary relevance of Maat because they essentially confine a sacred
100. For a more descriptive discussion of Maa Kheru, see Rudolf Anthes, “The Original
Meaning of M le hnv,” Journal o f Near Eastern Studies XIII (January-October, 1954): 21-51.
101. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 1 ,181.
102. Karenga, ‘Toward a Sociology of Maatian Ethics: Literature and Context” in
Reconstructing Kemetic Culture, ed. Maulana Karenga (Los Angeles: University of Sankore
Press, 1990), 90.
103. Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt,” vol. II, 721.
104. C. E. Harris Jr., Applying Moral Theories, 2d ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth
Publishing Company, 1992), 12.

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 A frican W orld H istory P roject— P reliminary C hallenge

African concept to a choice between being either a recipe of self-interest or a

remedy for promoting an amorphous humanism that blurs cultural bound­
aries. In addition, these cultural boundaries become even more important when
we note that a great deal of Western virtue-oriented ethical discourse traces
the roots of its intellectual genealogy to Aristotle, especially in discussions of
how virtue is acquired.105For Aristotle, “moral or ethical virtue is the product
of habit (ethos).”106 Hence, practicing virtues actualizes virtuous traits or dis­
positions of character in the person. For Aristotle, then, “it is correct therefore
to say that a man becomes just by doing just actions and temperate by doing
temperate actions; and no one can have the remotest chance of becoming good
without doing them.”107 The issue of culture must be inserted here to affirm
that what may be just, temperate, and good for Aristotle can, at the same time,
be anti-African. Aristotle does not have to reveal the philosophy behind the
practice because it is taken as a given and, indeed, he frowns upon alluding to
philosophy when discussing virtue.108
It is for this reason that I extend Karenga’s definition of virtue to be
defined as the excellent quality in an African person that enables the indi­
vidual to help preserve and perpetuate an African cultural way of life and thus
the African community. A virtue is not only individual, it is also both cultural
and political, being based on shared patterns of interpreting reality, shared
interests, and shared goals. If this is not taken into account, these virtues be­
come confused, diluted, and cannot be usefully separated from Marxist eth­
ics, Christian ethics, Islamic ethics, and so on. Without the allegiance to the
African world view, Maat provides no basis for the preference of preserving
and perpetuating an African cultural universe over an alien cultural universe.
Hence, rather than abstracting a modem virtue-oriented ethical system to ana­
lyze Maat, it seems to be more beneficial to situate it in the holistic context of
the African world view and thereby avoid taking sides in an essentially West­
ern philosophical family debate. Maa r Kheru is important here because it
asserts that Maat must also be seen as an African social theory along with
stressing its importance relative to conduct and character. Bobby Wright sug­
gests that “a social theory determines the destiny of a people by establishing
guidelines of life, i.e., it defines their relationship with other living things, it
defines values and rituals, methods of education, how enemies are to be dealt
with.”109 Locating the agenda of our enemies is essential because it is masked
105. Bernard Rosen, Ethical Theory: Strategies and Concepts (Mountain View, Calif.:
Mayfield Publishing Co., 1993), 190-194.
106. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 71.
107. Ibid., 87.
108. Ibid.
109. Bobby E. Wright, The Psychopathic Racial Personality and Other Essays (Chicago:
Third World Press, 1990), 34.

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 M aat: C ultural and I ntellectual A llegiance of a C oncept

behind notions of truth, justice, righteousness, balance, and order. These no­
tions are not incompatible with European world domination and are, indeed,
expressions of their rhetorical ethic, “a superficial verbal expression that is
not intended for assimilation by the members of the culture that produced
it.”110Ani is perceptive on this issue, asserting that “the body of literature known
as “ethical theory” has to a large degree been conducive to the growth of moral
hypocrisy in European culture.”111Hence, ethical theory functions as a cul­
tural shield that allows Europeans to philosophically adhere to virtues in the
abstract while continuing their concrete practice of world domination. Maat
cannot paradoxically yield a reluctance on our part to come to grips with the
deception of our enemies. If not careful, African people can be subtly seduced
into advocating the spurious belief that our most intimate cultural and politi­
cal interests should mirror the traditions and visions of Europeans. This belief
creates zombies of African people, and Europeans will inevitably continue to
direct our worldwide will like puppets. Of course, this plays right into the
hands of the European rhetorical ethic and dilutes African cultural resistance
in the process. Ethics is inextricably tied to the cultural universe of a people
and can never be delinked from it.
Speaking and doing Maat is the most profound spiritual and intellectual
libation that we can give to the Creator, the ancestors, and the yet unborn.
Screams of millions of maimed and moribund Africans, nameless yet named,
were screams for Maat. These screams must always haunt our consciousness
because they provide us, in part, with the strength and the will to wrest our
past from obscurity and from the pejorative slipshod generalities of European
propaganda that masquerades as historical truth. African history is not a fin­
ished building; it is a busy work site that is ready for African people to take
command of. When Carruthers poses Mdw Nfr, Good Speech, as a major con­
cept for African people, he seems to be suggesting that the creation of reality
comes into being through speech. Our speech must be bold enough to stand
up against the hazy and all-pervasive chaotic totality of the Western world and
courageous enough to provide a vision of Maat for the liberation of African
people that transcends the geographical and resulting mental blockade of Af­
rican people within the confines of the European concept of nation-state. When
we speak this vision to our children, “justice will stand firm and our children
will live.” The “Instruction of Merikare” assures us that “justice comes to him
distilled shaped in the sayings of the ancestors.”1121 hope that the ancestors
110. Ani, Yurugu, 315.
111. Ani takes this position because ethical theory is reduced to mere verbal expression
and it is not reflective of their ideological commitment to maintain European world domina­
tion. See Ani, Yurugu, 315,328.
112. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. I, 99.

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 A frican W orld H istory P roject— P reliminary C hallenge

will be pleased with my listening of their truth. I have heard Maat and pon­
dered it in my heart. To them, all credit is given; only the mistakes are mine. I
hope that this snapshot of African history is taken as a contribution that moves
us forward to the fulfillment of the overall portrait of African liberation.

Shem em hotep.

.|l! II

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Appendix A
A N ote on “Listening” in the Stela o f A ntef

ink sdm sdm.i m ict sw iw i is st fir ib

I am a listener: I hear Maat and ponder it in the heart.

I have made an independent analysis of this important portion of the Stela of

Antef that succinctly, yet profoundly, lays out the essential characteristics of
an effective listener.113 Clearly, the worst of the present translations can be
found in R. B. Parkinson’s Voices From Ancient Egypt.11* His translation reads
“I was one who harkened, hearing truth, who passed over matters of no con­
cern.” He fails to translate the independent pronoun ink, “I am,” which is also
the subject and, in this case, is followed by a nominal predicate sdm, “lis­
tener.” Thus, the phrase “I was one who harkened” is mystifying. The phrase
“hearing truth” indicates that he also fails to translate the first person, singu­
lar suffix pronoun i, “I,” which, in this case, is used as a nominative with the
simple tense of the verb sdm, “to hear.” The ending “who passed over matters
of no concern” is not even remotely close, failing to translate the verb swawa,
“to ponder,” the enclitic particle is, the dependent pronoun st, “it,” the prepo­
sition M “in,” and the noun ib, “the heart.”
Miriam Lichtheim’s translation of the passage as “I am a listener who
listens to the truth, Who ponders it in the heart” is an improvement, but her
mistake in translating the suffix pronoun i, “I,” as the relative pronoun who
and inserting an unwarranted relative pronoun who as a logical nexus between
ma’t and swawa detracts from the deeper implications of this passage.115
In Selections From the Husia, Maulana Karenga makes a further im­
provement, translating it as “I am a listener, one who listens to Maat and who
ponders it in the heart.”116 His improvement, in particular, is to be seen in his
separation of the independent pronoun ink and the nominal predicate sdm from
the remainder of the sentence with a comma. But, like Lichtheim, he does not
translate the suffix pronoun i, choosing the relative pronoun who instead. In
addition, sdm in conjunction with the preposition n (to) would have made the
translation of “listen to” more plausible in both Karenga’s and Lichtheim’s
113. For this analysis, I have used Hieroglyphic Texts from Egyptian Stelae, etc., in the
British Museum, vol. II (London, 1912), 23.
114. R. B. Parkinson, Voices From Ancient Egypt (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1991), 63.
115. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 122-123.
116. Maulana Karenga, Selections from The Husia: Sacred Wisdom o f Ancient Egypt
(Los Angeles: The University of Sankore Press, 1989), 98.

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 A frican W orld H istory P roject— P reliminary C hallenge

rendition, but since the form is absent, the translation is incorrect. More im­
portantly, I believe both Karenga and Lichtheim make the mistake of translat­
ing both occurrences of sdm as “listen” because it is clear by the two different
ways in which the Kemites symbolically presented sdm in this passage, one
with the ear, the owl, and the symbol for conveying abstract notions as the
determinative and the other with the ear alone along with the stroke determi­
native and the symbol for conveying abstract notions as the determinative,
that they wanted to convey two different, yet interdependent notions.1171 try to
capture this nuance in my translation. Since the independent pronoun in Kemet
is used emphatically, I translate ink sdm as “I am a listener” and separate it
from the rest of the passage with a colon. Thus, the rest of the passage de­
scribes what a listener is. It is at this point that I visually see the importance of
the suffix pronoun i, “I,” along with the simple tense of the verb sdm that is
presented by the Kemites as a lone ear. I take this form of sdm to convey the
notion “I hear” which does not repeat the notion of listening and, indeed,
shows that there is a distinction to be made between listening and hearing.
This seems to suggest that there is an external ear and an inner ear. In this
passage, to hear means that one is aware of Maat by the external ear, but it
takes something else in addition to this awareness to truly be a listener (i.e. to
hear Maat internally). And that something else is the pondering of Maat in
your heart. Thus, the sense of equilibrium, or balance, between hearing Maat
and pondering it in the heart is vital to effective listening. To be a listener, one
must transcend the corporeal sense of hearing Maat and also employ the heart
which thinks and speaks silently. In our quest to restore African traditions,
good listening is a prerequisite for good speech and when they are in har­
mony, the tongue will naturally speak Maat which has been pondered in
the heart.

117. In analyzing this line of the Stela of Antef, Karenga is only partially correct when he
asserts that he is contemplating Maat “not so much as an abstract Truth or ideal, but as an en­
gaging moral practice. This is attested to by the long list of Maatian virtues he cites as defin­
itive of his character.” See Maulana Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A
Study of Classical African Ethics,” vol. I (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1994),
244. While moral practice is an important concern in the context of the stela, Maat, as an ab­
stract notion and ideal, is not to be downplayed especially in this particular line where the
symbol for conveying abstract notions is used as a determinative for Maat and both uses
of sdm.

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 M aat: C ultural and I ntellectual A llegiance of a C oncept

Appendix B
A N ote on the Ostrich and the M ovem ent
o f D ivine Water in K em etic and D ogon C osm ology

The ostrich is an important species of bird in Kemet, not only because it is the
first bird for which we have pictorial evidence, but also because of its symbolic
importance. Since the ostrich feather is so intimately linked to conveying Maat,
further study of the ostrich might provide us with more information about
Maat and the links between Kemet and other African cultures that indicate a
shared cultural pattern of expressing and experiencing deep thought.
For the Kemites, the ostrich, called niw, is symbolically presented ex­
actly like the Old Kingdom Pyramid Text writing of the primeval water which
was also called niw. Both writings show the horizontal zigzag line for water
(—), the flowering reed ((]), and the quail chick (^); the only difference be­
tween the two being the symbol of the ostrich as a determinative.118The dif­
ferent writings are visually depicted as follows:

^ niw “ostrich”
22 EE “primeval waters”

There are at least two different ways in which the ostrich was visually depicted
by the Kemites. In this particular writing of niw, the ostrich is shown with its
wings extended upward conveying the notion of movement as opposed to
another depiction where the wings are not extended.119 This background
information leads us to a challenging query. Why did the movement of the
ostrich remind the Kemites of the primeval waters? It is Dogon cosmology
that provides useful insight into this query.
Like Kemet, the Dogon often depict water using a single zigzag line.120
Ogotemmeli informs us that the Water Spirit (Nummo) is “often depicted as a
118. Adolf Ennan and Herman Grapow, Worterbuch DerAegyptischen Sprache, Vol. II
(Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlun, 1928), 202; Raymond O. Faulkner, A Concise
Dictionary o f Middle Egyptian (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 1991), 125.
119. See (G 34) in Sir Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the
Study o f Hieroglyphs, 3d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 470.
120. Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Reli­
gious Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 212. This zigzag pattern is frequently
seen in Kemet, especially during the “predynastic” period. This pattern is frequently shown on
ostrich eggs, but for the most part, its importance has essentially been unexplained. See Helene
J. Kantor, “A Predynastic Ostrich Egg With Incised Decoration,” Journal o f Near Eastern Stud­
ies VII, no. 1 (January 1948): 51. Despite this fact, the southern Sudanic origins of these zigzag
patterns on incised black pottery has been recognized. See A. J. Arkell, “The Sudan Origin of
Predynastic ‘Black Incised’ Pottery," Journal o f Egyptian Archaeology 39 (1953): 76-79.

243
 A frican W orld H istory P roject— P reliminary C hallenge

wavy line, indicating the movement of water, which is also very commonly
seen in the form of vertical zigzag lines representing the course of terrestrial
streams as well as the way in which the Nummo falls on to the earth from
heaven in the form of rain. And this movement may sometimes be suggested
by the picture of an ostrich, whose body, shown by concentric circles, is marked
with chevrons, and whose zigzag course, when pursued, is unlike that of any
other winged creature of the plain.”121 There is clearly an interesting parallel
here between the Kemites and Dogon in attaching such importance to the
ostrich and the movement of divine water, Nummo in the case of the Dogon
and the primeval waters in Kemet. This parallel extends beyond the ostrich to
point to the fundamental assumption that spirit is present in all physical reali­
ties and water functions as the life force. According to Ogotemmeli, water and
Nummo were one and the same. Moreover, “without Nummo . . . it was not
even possible to create the earth, for the earth was moulded clay and it is from
water (that is, from Nummo) that its life is derived . . . . The life-force of the
earth is water. God moulded the earth with water.”122From an African world
view, this provides further evidence of why it is not only a mistake, but a
fundamental error to detach the primeval hill from the primeval waters in
Kemetic cosmology, especially when discussing the breadth and depth of Maat.

121. Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli, 110.

122. Ibid., 18-19.