Abstract
Until relatively recently, the prevailing opinion had it that the sacred institution of kingship had nothing or very little in common with the profane world of the Ancient Egyptians. As a consequence, limited attention was paid by the mainstream scholarship to mutual interconnections between the royal and non-royal worlds.
As a contribution to the efforts to combine as many sources of evidence as possible and to see Ancient Egyptian society as a dynamic and multifaceted process "punctured" with principal discontinuities signalling major and abrupt periods of profound change of a prominent historical significance, this study shall focus on the analysis of the role of the concept of maat during the Old Kingdom, with specific attention paid to the 5th Dynasty. It will be demonstrated that it was during this particular period that maat made the most imposing impact on the society of the day.
This development entailed wider implications for the administration of the state and, at the same time, led to new prospects of resurrection for these individuals, i.e. an afterlife adequate to their work activities while alive and in the service of the king. The Osiris cult was certainly a very innovative and integral part of this development.
The emerging picture is that changing dynamics in Ancient Egyptian society as a consequence of a major decentralisation and "democratisation" of the state administration which required wider participation and new ways of unification of different forms of power imbued with religious concepts of the period. In this context, the granting of the "hem-netjer-priest of Maat" title in the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom is worth noticing; in these periods, it was exclusively by the viziers.