Ammit

Summary

Ammit is, in ancient Egyptian religion, the creature who waits at the balance of judgment to eat the heart of a dead person who is not justified. Her Egyptian name is ꜥm-mwt, "devourer of the dead"; she has a crocodile's head, a lion's forepart and a hippopotamus's hindquarters. Her best-known pictures are in the papyri of Ani and Hunefer, of the Nineteenth Dynasty, in the thirteenth century BCE.

Her story is a single scene. In Ani's papyrus the balance stands in the hall of judgment, Ani's heart in one pan and the feather of Maat in the other; Anubis kneels at the plumb, Thoth stands with his reed to write, and behind him on a mat sits Ammit, ready to spring forward and eat the heart if its owner fails the test. Ani asks his heart not to witness against him; Thoth says he has judged the heart and found no evil in it; the gods declare Ani justified, and Horus leads him to Osiris. In Hunefer's papyrus Ammit crouches below the balance, with a caption beside her: her front is a crocodile, her rear a hippopotamus, her middle a lion. Here too heart and feather balance, and Hunefer goes on to Osiris, seated with Isis and Nephthys. In both pictures Ammit eats no one, because the owners of both papyri pass the judgment.

The text of chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead says what she stands for. The dead person says he knows the names of the forty-two gods in the Hall of the Two Maats, who live on the henchmen of evil and drink their blood on the day of reckoning characters before Osiris. Among these judges are "Shadow-eater who comes from the cave", whose Egyptian name uses the same verb as Ammit's, "Blood-eater who comes from the slaughterhouse" and "Breaker of bones". In a copy of the same chapter in a Turin papyrus, "the Devourer, Lady of the West" destroys the enemies in the West.

The idea her story turns on is that judgment means nothing without a consequence. A heart weighed down with injustice is eaten; its owner does not go on to Osiris, and nothing of him remains after death. Her body is made of three animals the people of the Nile knew: the crocodile and the hippopotamus of the river and the lion of the desert edge, so she joins the animals of the water and of the land in one body. The project's Egyptian essay reads her as forgetting: whoever did not live by Maat is forgotten, and the greatest punishment is to be erased from memory.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The project's Egyptian Semitic essay reads it ʿammīt, from amma in the sense of swallowing or from ʿamma in the sense of comprising. The Egyptian name is two words: ꜥm, to swallow, devour, and mwt, the dead. The second is Arabic mawt, death, with its three letters, m for m, w for w, t for t; Egyptian mwt is to die and a dead person. The first keeps the ʿayn of ʿamma: in Lane ʿamma is to include the whole within its compass, ʿamma al-maṭaru al-arḍa, the rain covered the whole land, and ʿammahum bi-l-ʿaṭiyya, he included them all in the gift. On this reading ꜥm-mwt is "she who takes in all the dead", who comprises them and swallows them. The essay's other reading, amma, meets the scene from another side: in Lane umm is also an abode, a dwelling, and that is how the Qur'an's words are explained about him whose scales are light: "his abode is the Abyss".

Linguistic Root

The Egyptian dictionary gives ꜥm as to swallow, devour, absorb, records a reduplicated ꜥmꜥm, to devour, and builds many names of underworld beings from it: the Shadow-eater, the one who swallows those who are not in the Book of Gates, the one who devours everything in the Amduat. Mwt is to die and the dead, the same root found in Arabic, Hebrew and Akkadian: the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon sets Hebrew mût beside Akkadian mâtu, Arabic and Aramaic. It matches Arabic mawt without substitution.

ʿAmma keeps the ʿayn and the m in place. Lane: ʿamma is to comprise the whole; ʿammahum al-maraḍu, the disease spread among them all; ʿamīm, complete, without deficiency. The shared sense is enclosing everything, and swallowing encloses a thing on every side. But Lane gives no sense of swallowing for ʿamma, and that is the open point. Amma loses the ʿayn, and Lane gives it no sense of gulping as the essay does, but he gives umm as abode in the verse of al-Qāriʿa, which is a verse of the scales.

Key Mythic Narratives

The devourers among the judges

Before Ammit was drawn with her body, the devourers' names were already in the text of the chapter. The forty-two judges in Maiherperi's Eighteenth-Dynasty copy have fearsome names: Wide-of-stride, Flame-embracer, Shadow-eater, Blood-eater, Entrails-eater, White-of-teeth, Breaker of bones. Each comes from a known Egyptian town, such as Iunu, Khemenu or Memphis, so the court is an assembly of the whole land.

The devourer of the West in late texts

The Egyptian dictionary records her name in a feminine form, ꜥm.t-mwt-n.t-jmn.tjt, devourer of the dead of the West, in a magical papyrus in the Brooklyn Museum, where she is listed among the fearsome beings to be kept away from Pharaoh by night and by day, together with enemies, dogs and harmful dead. The creature who waited at the balance has become, in this papyrus, a danger the living are guarded against.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Egyptian essay reads the weighing of the heart as a trial in which a person judges himself, the heart being his deeds and the feather the standard, and it reads Ammit as forgetting: whoever does not live by Maat is forgotten and has no eternity, and the greatest punishment is to be erased from memory.

The reading finds support in the Egyptian care for the name. The papyrus that draws Ammit carries its owner's name and titles in every scene, the stela set up in the tomb keeps the dead person's name so that he stays known, and every dead person is called "the Osiris so-and-so". What Ammit eats is the heart that carries its owner, so that no one is left to be called by that name. In both surviving pictures of Ammit the owner of the papyrus passes, because the papyrus was written for its owner to be buried justified; her picture is a reminder of what could have happened.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Ammit belongs to the judgment of the dead, and other traditions have devourers who stand at the court or at the door of the dead. In Iran, at the Chinvat Bridge, the soul is watched by Astwihad, who devours creatures of every kind and knows no satiety, as the Mēnōg ī Xrad says. In the North Níðhǫggr sucks the corpses of the dead on Nástrǫnd, where perjurers and murderers wade rivers of venom. Among the Greeks Cerberus, the raw-flesh-eating hound of Hades, stands at the door, fawning on those who enter and eating whoever tries to leave. In India the funeral hymn calls the two dogs of Yama insatiate. The difference is that Ammit eats only those who fail the judgment, and eats the heart so that nothing remains, while Cerberus eats those who try to escape, and the wicked of Iran and the North remain in torment.

Egypt itself has another devourer: Apophis, who swallows the river's water to strand the sun's boat and is forced to spew it out. Apophis swallows to stop the sun; Ammit swallows to end whoever betrayed Maat. Both belong to the Duat, one of the witnesses to the descent to the underworld.