Name: Ammit or Ammut

Classification: Demon/Goddess

Recorded: the Egyptian funerary text, the Book of the Dead

[Pictured above is the “Weighing of the Heart,” a hieroglyphic representation of the Ancient Egyptian ritual which the demon Ammit was associated with and involved in. She is pictured on the far right of the image, sitting at the feet of Thoth, “the ibis-headed god of writing,” who is depicted as recording the proceedings (Stocker 40). This scene is the judgment of the dead, a ritual central to the Ancient Egyptians’ belief system. The ritual began with the god Horus presenting the deceased person, clad entirely in white, pictured on the left of the image. Anubis, “the jackal-headed god of mummification,” would then balance the heart of the deceased soul against an ostrich feather – the symbol for “the ultimate standard of truth and righteousness” called maat – on the Scales of Ma’at (Stocker 40). He and the scales are shown in the center of the image. If the judge Osiris deemed a soul “good” by virtue of its heart being light enough, then it would be considered worthy and allowed to move on to the afterlife in “laru, the ‘Field of Reeds’” (Stocker 40). However, in the event that Osiris deemed the soul “evil” because its heart weighed too heavily due to sin in comparison to the feather, Ammit “the Devourer” would “gobble up the sinful heart” which would condemn the soul in question to oblivion (Wilson 43). Today, it is possible to see this depiction and the rest of The Book of the Dead in person in the Ancient Egypt section of the Musée du Louvre in Paris.]

Ammit is just one name for this Ancient Egyptian deity, but it is the most common. Other regularly used names by which this creature can be called include Ammut and Ahemait. Additionally, various texts refer differently to this creature as “he,” “she,” or “it” with the most common pronoun being “she,” and while some texts say she was a demon, others say she was a god/goddess. Other sources claim she is both. For the purpose of this article, I will draw on the most frequently used terms: Ammit, she, and demon.

The legends of Ammit are found recorded in The Book of the Dead, the funerary text of the Ancient Egyptians. It is important to note that this is not a text we would define as a “book” in our modern society. Instead, the stories found within The Book of the Dead were record in hieroglyphics and illustrations on numerous sheets of papyrus that were then glued together to form long scrolls. This are located today at the Paris’s Musée du Louvre in the section on Ancient Egypt. Furthermore, “the text is spoken, or at least intended to be spoken, not by priests, but by the deceased person him (or her)self” (“The Department Of Ancient Egypt And Sudan At The British Museum” 43).

Physically, Ammit appears as having the head of a crocodile, the forelegs of a wildcat, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus. Depictions of the demon vary somewhat, even within The Book of the Dead. For example, in some instances the feline portion of her body is spotted and in others it is not. Also noteworthy is that she is in some cases shown as having what appears to be a headdress similar to what the Egyptian pharaohs wore, while in others she is not. Ammit is nearly always shown sitting and occasionally lying down, but she is never shown throughout The Book of the Dead in the process of devouring the heart of a sinful soul despite this act being what she is known for. In fact, she is known as “the Devourer of the Dead” for this role in the judgment of the dead of which she was one of forty-two deities (Hart 33).