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#Justice

Right order, judgement, and reckoning: divine and civic.

Ink rubbing of an Eastern Han carved stone tomb relief: the Queen Mother of the West sits frontally on a throne formed of a dragon and a tiger whose scaled bodies coil out beneath her, flanked by birds, a nine-tailed creature and attendants; below, rows of kneeling worshippers and offering vessels, and at the base an ox-cart and a horse-drawn chariot procession, all within a carved rectangular border.
Chinese

Xiwangmu, Queen Mother of the West

Before she was the jade-decked matron of the immortals, she was a cave-dwelling numen with a tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail, whistling on a western mountain and presiding over plague and ruin.

5 minShanhaijing
The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin: a tall pink-sandstone monument carved in relief. The Akkadian king Naram-Suen, wearing a horned helmet of divinity and carrying a bow and spear, climbs a wooded mountain above his soldiers, who advance in file; his defeated enemies fall, flee and beg beneath him, and sun-and-star glyphs of the gods shine over the peak.
Mesop.

The Curse of Agade

A king took axes to the god's own house, packed the temple's gold into leather bags, and loaded it onto ships. So the poets, four centuries after the city fell, explained why Agade vanished from the earth.

6 min'The cursing of Agade'
Edo-period Japanese woodblock book-illustration of the moon-god Tsukuyomi, a bearded deity in flowing court robes seated frontally with a full moon-disc halo behind his head, one hand raised to his brow, surrounded by columns of classical Japanese text.
Japanese

Tsukuyomi, the Moon God

Born from the right eye of a god washing himself clean of the dead, the moon drew his sword on a goddess who fed him from her mouth, and for that the sun turned her face away: the quiet god whose one act set the sun and moon apart.

5 minNihon Shoki
Ancient Egyptian limestone stela with an arched, painted lunette. Under a winged sun-disk, the upper register shows the god Osiris enthroned in the tall White Crown holding the crook, the goddess Isis seated behind him on a second throne, and the falcon-headed god Horus standing before them presenting lotus flowers over a laden offering-stand; columns of green-filled hieroglyphs fill the field, with a royal cartouche between Osiris and Horus. In the lower register a shaven-headed worshipper raises both hands in adoration before a heaped offering-table, beside several columns of a hieroglyphic hymn.
Egyptian

Horus Avenges His Father

Reared in the marshes until his arm was strong, the falcon-son came for the throne his uncle stole: three ancient traditions, a slaughter, a tribunal and a war, and not one clean duel among them.

6 minPyramid Texts
An ancient Egyptian funerary papyrus of the Book of the Amduat, its central register showing the sun-god's night-bark crewed by a file of standing gods, with columns of black-and-red hieroglyphs and rows of processional deities above and below.
Egyptian

The Duat and the Night Journey

A ram-headed sun hauled by ropes through a valley of the dead, a serpent staked with knives, a rebirth out of a monster's tail: the Egyptian underworld the sun and the dead must cross before dawn.

8 minThe Book of the Dead
A hand-coloured lithograph plate of Geb (Sèb), the earth god, enthroned and crowned, from Champollion's Panthéon égyptien.
Egyptian

Geb, the Earth Beneath

To bite the ground is to bite a god. He is the floor of the world, the judge at the head of the Nine, and the father who hands the throne of Egypt down to his son.

5 minPyramid Texts
An ancient Egyptian tomb painting from the tomb of Nefertari: the winged goddess Maat kneeling on the lintel of the burial chamber, her great wings spread, facing east.
Egyptian

Maat: The Feather Against the Heart

Truth, justice and the balance of the cosmos wear a single ostrich feather; against it the heart of the dead is weighed, and the gods themselves are said to live on her.

6 minThe Book of the Dead
Ancient Egyptian dark-stone magical stela (cippus): in a recessed panel the nude child-god Horus stands frontally on two crocodiles, grasping serpents, a scorpion, a lion and a gazelle in his fists, crowned by the mask of the god Bes and flanked by two deities standing on coiled serpents; above, an arched lunette with registers of gods and dense hieroglyphs.
Egyptian

The Contendings of Horus and Set

Eighty years of lawsuits and duels for a dead king's throne: an uncle and a nephew, a bench of gods that cannot make up its mind, and a mother who will not let her son lose.

6 min"The Contendings of Horus and Seth
Detail from an ancient Egyptian funerary papyrus: the devourer Ammit crouched on the ground beside the judgment scene — a composite beast with the open-jawed head and scaly neck of a crocodile, the spotted-leopard mane and forequarters of a lion, and the heavy hindquarters of a hippopotamus, her four feet resting on the green ground-line; the ibis-headed scribe-god Thoth stands at left with his palette, and columns of hieroglyphs run along the top.
Egyptian

Ammit, Devourer of the Dead

She never lifts a claw and never speaks a line: the beast who crouches by the scales in the Hall of the Two Truths does one thing only, and it is the worst thing the Egyptian afterlife could imagine.

5 minThe Egyptian Book of the Dead
A hand-coloured lithograph plate of Thoth trismégiste: the ibis-headed god of writing standing in profile with a writing palette, from Champollion's Panthéon égyptien.
Egyptian

Thoth, Scribe of the Gods

Reed-pen in one hand and palette in the other, the ibis-headed god stands at the Great Balance and writes down whether a dead soul lived true: the recorder, the proclaimer, and the very word that ordered the world.

6 minThe Book of the Dead / Book of Coming Forth by Day
Detail from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer: jackal-headed Anubis performs the Opening of the Mouth ceremony before the tomb, steadying the upright mummy of the scribe while mourners kneel and priests bear offerings.
Egyptian

Anubis, Guardian of the Dead

The jackal on the desert ridge, black as fresh silt and embalmer's resin: the god who washed the entrails of Osiris, kept watch over the corpse through the night, and stood at the balance where the heart was weighed.

6 minThe Pyramid Texts
An ancient Egyptian bronze statuette of Horus as a falcon wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Egyptian

Horus, the Falcon King

The falcon-headed heir who takes back a stolen throne: son of a murdered god, raised in a marsh, and vindicated before the assembled gods as the rightful king of Egypt.

6 minPyramid Texts
An 18th-century Icelandic manuscript illustration of the binding of Fenrir: at right the crowned god Týr, sword raised in one hand, his other hand thrust into the jaws of the great wolf, which bites down on it; the wolf Fenrir crouches at centre; at left a second crowned god of the Aesir holds a spear and a curved fetter; a handwritten caption box sits at the upper right.
Norse

Tyr, God of the Oath

The boldest of the Aesir laid his sword-hand in a wolf's jaws to bind a doom he could not defeat, and lost it: the god who kept a pledge he knew was false.

5 minSnorri Sturluson