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administered by pious foundations. Each cult focused on statues of the dead pharaoh that were the basis of what amounted to an elaborate form of ancestor worship and that represented a shift in the nature of kingship from the First Dynasty to the Fourth.
    In the early days, kingship among the Egyptians centered on military and physical prowess. To be pharaoh, the ruler had to be smart, strong, and sly; weakness meant the end of rule. The sed festival of early Egypt tested the king’s mettle by requiring him to run the perimeter of a large court-yard, possibly several times. Since sed is rooted in the Egyptian word sdi, which means “slay” or “butcher,” it is very likely that a king who proved less than vigorous was dead by the end of the sed festival, and a stronger rival had taken over the palace.
    The philosophy of the pharaoh as the biggest, baddest guy on the Nile changed with Djoser and Imhotep. With a unified, peaceful Egypt, the king became less a military dictator who enforced order in the Two Lands than the man who was responsible for maintaining the fundamental order of the cosmos.
    Since we see history as linear, we might assume that the emergence of the benben (the first land) from the original chaos set the universe on its course once and for all. The Egyptians, though, saw history as circular: what happened before will happen again. Chaos, or isfet, was always waiting to overwhelm creation and return the cosmos to formlessness. Existence depended on maintaining the balance between creation and chaos, a delicate, subtle, equilibrium the Egyptians called ma’at. Sometimes translated as “truth,” ma’at has a meaning akin to Hebrew shalom, Arabic salaam, Sanskrit om, and Hawaiian aloha, implying balance on a scale that reaches from the individual to the cosmos. To preserve ma’at, everything in the universe required the balance of its opposite. Male had female, up down, night day, black white, mortal immortal.
    To the pharaoh fell the cosmic task of bridging the gap between the two worlds of mortality and immortality, of this world and the afterlife. The pharaoh walked in the company of the gods, spoke their language, shared their wisdom, and enacted ceremonies daily that replicated the first instance of creation, thereby saving the cosmos from descent into chaos. Because the pharaoh attended to daily rituals that summoned the powers of creation against those of chaos, the natural world continued in its proper rhythms. When the pharaoh preserved ma’at, the Nile rose and fell as it should, the sun completed its daily passage from east to west, the moon always came back after three days of darkness, and prosperity and justice reigned in the Two Lands. The pharaoh’s was an awesome task, and it was his to fulfill in death as well as life.
    As befits the Egyptian sense of balanced duality, two worlds existed side by side. One was earthly existence—mortality, with its pain, illness, brevity, and impermanence. The other world was the afterlife—much like mortal life in its beauty and pleasure, yet eternal, populated by spirits the Egyptians called gods and lacking sickness, death, suffering, or worry. It was a blessed place to be, especially forever.
    At the moment of conception, the two worlds combined to create a child. The mortal, physical world contributed the body, which could operate only because it was animated by the spiritual ka. The ka could leave the body during sleep or unconsciousness, but it always returned—at least until death, when the ka departed the body yet remained close to the grave or tomb. Since the ka had directed needs like hunger and thirst during life, it continued to need food and drink after death.
    Each human also contained a ba, which lacked the personal identity of the ka and was a formless, cosmic energy that animated all beings. At death the ba returned to the universe, carrying no memory of its recent sojourn into mortality.
    At death, the ka and ba fled the body