CHAOS IN ANCIENT EGYPT JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS Uruguayan Institute of Egyptology ABSTRACT - A very common concept in egyptology, often shown as opposed to maat, is that of chaos. From a primeval 'chaotic' reality the creator god introduced order in nature realizing the potential for being that was latent in the Nun. When pharaohs came to rule Egypt as a unified country, the threat of chaos was always there, trying to undo the order that the gods had conceived and that the kings were supposed to uphold. But what was considered chaos in ancient Egypt, both in nature and in human communities, may have been just another form of order in which both, human and natural order, can exist, as valid and viable and just, or perhaps more so, than the pharaonic version. Before getting into the different aspects of the above subject, I would like to mention some concepts that may help visualize my perspective on this topic. To the uneducated eye the natural world appears to be chaotic, unless we are trained to detect the many nuances of life in its enormous variety of manifestations and the complex relationships among all living beings, the multiple phenomena that affect the earth, atmospheric, geological and others, it all appears as random manifestations without any apparent order. Nevertheless, as we delve deeper into this whole, we discover an order and a balance, too complex to be readily noticed, that assures the relative stability of reality in the short as well as in the long term 1 . 1 "Symmetry order is the unifying force in nature. It is the great attractor, the great point of balance toward which all change naturally progresses. Symmetry order is the invisible backdrop, the blank canvas, the board on which the game is played. Each imbalance exists timelessly embedded within the universal balance of the whole, and in the passage of time imbalances naturally, or probabilistically, evolve toward the native state of balance. Such is a universal principle nearly all people recognize intuitively", G. Giorbran, The Two Opposing Types of Order in Nature, in Everything Forever, Learning to See Timelessness, Seattle, 2007.