Words you MUST KnowThe Egyptian word maat refers to the fundamental order of the cosmos in Egyptian belief. Established at the creation of the world, maat distinguishes the world from the chaos that preceded and surrounds it. Maat encompasses both the proper behavior of humans and the normal functioning of the forces of nature, both of which make life and happiness possible. Because the actions of the gods govern natural forces and myths express those actions, Egyptian mythology represents the proper functioning of the cosmos and the sustenance of life itself.
To the Egyptians, the most important human maintainer of maat is the pharaoh. In myth the pharaoh is the son of a variety of deities. As such, he is their designated representative, obligated to maintain order in human society just as they do in the cosmos, and to continue the rituals that sustain them and their activities.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_mythologyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_mythologyAll credit goes to Wikipedia.In Egyptian belief, the disorder that predates the ordered world exists beyond the world as an infinite expanse of formless water, personified by the god Nun. The earth is a flat piece of land, the god Geb, over which arches the sky, usually represented by the goddess Nut. The two are separated by the personification of air, Shu. The sun god Ra is said to travel through the sky, across the body of Nut, enlivening the world with his light. At night Ra passes beyond the western horizon into the Duat, a mysterious region that borders the formlessness of Nun. At dawn he emerges from the Duat in the eastern horizon.
The nature of the sky and the location of the Duat are uncertain. Egyptian texts variously describe the nighttime sun as traveling beneath the earth and within the body of Nut. The Egyptologist James P. Allen believes that these explanations of the sun's movements are dissimilar but coexisting ideas. In Allen's view, Nut represents the visible surface of the waters of Nun, with the stars floating on this surface. The sun, therefore, sails across the water in a circle, each night passing beyond the horizon to reach the skies that arch beneath the inverted land of the Duat. Leonard H. Lesko, however, believes that the Egyptians saw the sky as a solid canopy and described the sun as traveling through the Duat above the surface of the sky, from west to east, during the night. Joanne Conman, modifying Lesko's model, argues that this solid sky is a moving, concave dome overarching a deeply convex earth. The sun and the stars move along with this dome, and their passage below the horizon is simply their movement over areas of the earth that the Egyptians could not see. These regions would then be the Duat.
The fertile lands of the Nile Valley (Upper Egypt) and Delta (Lower Egypt) lie at the center of the world in Egyptian cosmology. Outside them are the infertile deserts, which are associated with the chaos that lies beyond the world. Somewhere beyond them is the horizon, the akhet. There, two mountains, in the east and the west, mark the places where the sun enters and exits the Duat.
Foreign nations are associated with the hostile deserts in Egyptian ideology. Foreign people, likewise, are generally lumped in with the "nine bows", people who threaten pharaonic rule and the stability of maat, although peoples allied with or subject to Egypt may be viewed more positively. For these reasons, events in Egyptian mythology rarely take place in foreign lands. While some stories pertain to the sky or the Duat, Egypt itself is usually the scene for the actions of the gods. Often, even the myths set in Egypt seem to take place on a plane of existence separate from that inhabited by living humans, although in other stories, humans and gods interact. In either case, the Egyptian gods are deeply tied to their home land.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_mythologyIn Egyptian mythology, Duat (also Tuat and Tuaut) (also called Akert, Amenthes, or Neter-khertet) is the underworld. The Duat is a vast area under the Earth, connected with Nun, the waters of the primordial abyss. The Duat is the realm of the god Osiris and the residence of other gods and supernatural beings. It is the region through which the sun god Ra travels from west to east during the night, and where he battled Apep. It also was the place where people's souls went after death for judgement, though it was not the full extent of the afterlife.[1] Burial chambers formed touching-points between the mundane world and the Duat, and spirits could use tombs to travel back and forth from the Duat.
What we know of the Duat principally derives from funerary texts such as Book of Gates, Book of Caverns, Coffin Texts, Amduat and the Book of the Dead. Each of these documents fulfills a different purpose and gives a different perspective on the Duat, and different texts can be inconsistent with one another. The texts which survive differ in age and origin, and it is likely that there was never a single uniform interpretation of the Duat.
The geography of Duat is similar in outline to the world the Egyptians knew. There are realistic features like rivers, islands, fields, lakes, mounds and caverns, along with fantastic lakes of fire, walls of iron and trees of turquoise. In the Book of Two Ways, one of the Coffin Texts, there is even a map-like image of the Duat.
The Book of the Dead and Coffin Texts were intended to guide the recently deceased through the Duat's dangerous landscape and to a life as an akh or blessed spirit amongst the gods. The dead person must pass a series of gates guarded dangerous spirits, depicted as human bodies with grotesque heads of animals, insects, torches or knives. These beings have equally grotesque names, for instance "Blood-drinker who comes from the Slaughterhouse" or "One who eats the excrement of his hindquarters". Other features emphasised in these texts are mounds and caverns, inhabited by gods or supernatural animals, which threatened the spirits of the dead. The purpose of the books is not to lay out a geography, but to describe a succession of rites of passage which the dead would have to pass to reach the afterlife.
If the deceased successfully passed these unpleasant demons, he or she would reach the Weighing of the Heart. In this ritual, the heart of the deceased was weighed by Anubis, using a feather, representing Ma'at, the goddess of truth and justice. The heart would become out of balance because of failure to follow Ma'at and any hearts heavier or lighter than her feather were rejected and eaten by the Ammit, the Devourer of Souls. Those souls that passed the test would be allowed to travel toward the paradise of Aaru.
In spite of the unpleasant inhabitants of the Duat, this was no Hell to which souls were condemned; the nature of Duat is more complex than that. The grotesque spirits of the underworld were not evil, but under the control of the Gods. The Duat was also a residence of gods themselves; as well as Osiris, Anubis, Thoth, Horus, Hathor and Ma'at all appear as a dead soul makes its way toward judgement. It was also in the underworld that the sun, Ra, travelled under the Earth from west to east and was transformed from its aged Atum form into Khepri, the new dawning Sun. Just as a dead person faced many challenges in the Duat, Ra faced attack in the underworld from the evil serpent Apep
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat
