Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/135

, in the Egyptian as well as in the Indo-European and the Semitic languages, the notions of "straight, right, righteous, true, rule, row, order." Our own word rule, like the Latin regula and rectus, is derived from the Aryan root arg, from which we have in Sanskrit ringe, I stretch myself (like the Greek ), rigus straight, right, righteous; rāgis, a line, a row; in Zend, erezu, straight, right, true, and, as a substantive, finger. In Gothic we have rak-ja (uf-rak-ja, stretch out), rach-ts, right, straight. The Egyptian maāt is not only Truth and Justice, but Order and Law, in the physical as well as in the moral world. It is in allusion to the fixed and unalterable laws of nature (which of course were very imperfectly known to them) that the Egyptians used the expression ānχ em maāt, "living or existing by or upon rule," which, if not actually a term equivalent to divinity, is at least with them the attribute most constantly connected with it. It was in consequence of the persistent recurrence of the same physical phenomena in an order which never varied and was never violated, that the Sun and Moon and other powers,