The composite monster waiting beside the scales of judgment: crocodile head, lion forequarters, hippopotamus rear, assembled from the three animals Egyptians most feared. If your heart failed the weighing, she ate it, and you ended.
Documented
Spell 125 and the scales
Documented: the Book of the Dead's Spell 125 shows the judgment hall, the heart weighed against the feather of Maat, truth itself, while Ammit crouches by the balance. Hearts heavier than the feather, swollen with wrongdoing, go to her. The result is called dying a second time: not torment, annihilation, the name erased from existence. Ammit has no cult, no priesthood, no mythology beyond the scene. She is a verdict with teeth.
Assessment: Fully documented in the papyri, including the Papyrus of Ani and dozens of parallels. Egypt's hell was an eraser, and the eraser had a face.
Stories
The pet of the judgment hall
The folk version modernizes her into a beast-god, Sobek's enforcer, a hellhound on Anubis's leash, and lately a pop-culture villain. The recasting is understandable: a creature that vivid demands a story. The texts refuse to give her one. She does not hunt, tempt, or rebel. She waits.
Assessment: Documented as modern elaboration on a documented figure. The absence of mythology is itself the finding: Egypt assigned its worst outcome to a being too low to worship, punishment as plumbing.
Interesting claims
Judgment as state technology
The interesting claim: the weighing scene is administration, not theology. The heart is audited against a standard, the confession is a checklist of negative declarations, I have not stolen, I have not lied, I have not made anyone hungry, and the destroyer is the shredder at the end of the process. On this reading the afterlife court is the Egyptian bureaucracy's self-portrait, and morality is whatever keeps the file clean.
Assessment: Documented as structure, the scene genuinely is procedural, down to the recorded verdict. Whether that makes it bureaucracy in the sky or a moral cosmology with efficient clerks is the interpreter's call. File as the sharpest secular reading available.
Sources and further reading
Book of the Dead, Spell 125, the judgment scene and the devourer
Papyrus of Ani (c. 1250 BC), British Museum, the canonical weighing image
Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (1972)
Taylor, Ancient Egyptian Funerary Texts in the British Museum (2010)
Worth asking
The worst punishment Egypt could imagine was not pain. It was deletion. What does that say about what they thought a person was?