Ma'at appears in the Pyramid Texts of Unas, c. 2375 BCE, as the principle holding cosmos and state together: truth, justice, harmony, balance, order, reciprocity, propriety, against her opposite, isfet, chaos. At death, in the Hall of Two Truths, the heart was weighed against her ostrich feather; heavier meant Ammit. The 42 Negative Confessions of the Papyrus of Ani, chapter 125, are the audit checklist: I have not stolen, I have not caused anyone to weep, I have not been boastful. Judges wore her emblem; kings called themselves Lords of Ma'at.
Egypt left almost no written legal code, because Ma'at was the code: tradition, persuasive rhetoric, impartiality, and the wealthy feeding the hungry, as tomb inscriptions boast. The Sebayt wisdom texts, Ptahhotep, the Eloquent Peasant, taught case-by-case righteousness rather than rules. Justice was a posture, not a statute, for three thousand years, which is either the most stable legal culture in history or the best branded.
The claim: a civilization confident in its order does not invent an afterlife checkpoint; the weighing ritual betrays that Ma'at was experienced as perpetually failing, isfet always one pharaoh away, and the feather's function was to terrorize the living into maintaining what nature would not maintain itself. Verdict: the Egyptians said as much, cosmic order required constant human maintenance, unlike the gods' automatic realms. Ma'at is not a description of the universe. It is a work order.
If your heart outweighs a feather, which one was calibrated wrong?