The ankh (; Egyptian ?n?), also known as "crux ansata" (the Latin for "cross with a handle") is an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic ideograph symbolizing "life".
The Egyptian gods are often portrayed carrying it by its loop, or bearing one in each hand, arms crossed over their chest. The ankh appears in hand or in proximity of almost every deity in the Egyptian pantheon (including Pharaohs).
The ankh symbol was so prevalent that it has been found in digs as far as Mesopotamia and Persia, and even on the seal of the biblical king Hezekiah.
The symbol became popular in New Age mysticism in the 1960s.
Unicode has two characters encoding the symbol, U+2625 ? in the widely-supported Miscellaneous Symbols block and U+132F9 ? in the more recent Egyptian Hieroglyphs block.
Video Ankh
Origin
There have been many suggestions and theories as to the origin of the ankh symbol.
Alan Gardiner (1957) explains the hieroglyph as a depiction of a sandal-strap (?n?) which came to be read phonetically and could be used (as "rebus writing") for the similar word ?n? "live", a triliteral root probably pronounced /?ánax/ in Old and Middle Egyptian. This verb and its derivatives are likely ancestral to the Coptic words ??? ?nh "to live, life" and ???? eneh "eternity".
One of the earliest proposals was that of Thomas Inman, first published in 1869, according to which the symbol combines "the male triad and the female unit". E. A. Wallis Budge (1904) postulated that the symbol originated as the belt buckle of the mother goddess Isis.
Andrew Hunt Gordon and Calvin Schwabe, in their 2004 book The Quick and the Dead, speculated that the ankh, djed, and was symbols have a basis in "cattle culture" and with semen (thought to originate in the spine) being equated with "life", with the ankh representing the thoracic vertebra of a bull (seen in cross section), the djed representing the sacrum of a bull's spine, and the was representing a staff made from a bull's penis.
Maps Ankh
History
The ankh appears frequently in Egyptian tomb paintings and other art, often at the fingertips of a god or goddess in images that represent the deities of the afterlife conferring the gift of life on the dead person's mummy; this is thought to symbolize the act of conception. Additionally, an ankh was often carried by Egyptians as an amulet, either alone, or in connection with two other hieroglyphs that mean "strength" and "health" (see explication of djed and was, above). Mirrors of beaten metal were also often made in the shape of an ankh, either for decorative reasons or to symbolize a perceived view into another world.
A symbol similar to the ankh appears frequently in Minoan and Mycenaean sites. This is a combination of the sacral knot (symbol of holiness) with the double-edged axe (symbol of matriarchy) but it can be better compared with the Egyptian tyet which is similar. This symbol can be recognized on the two famous figurines of the chthonian Snake Goddess discovered in the palace of Knossos. Both snake goddesses have a knot with a projecting loop cord between their breasts. In the Linear B (Mycenean Greek) script, ankh is the phonetic sign za.
The ankh also appeared frequently in coins from ancient Cyprus and Asia Minor (particularly the city of Mallus in Cilicia). In some cases, especially with the early coinage of King Euelthon of Salamis, the letter ku, from the Cypriot syllabary, appeared within the circle ankh, representing Ku(prion) (Cypriots). To this day, the ankh is also used to represent the planet Venus (the namesake of which, the goddess Venus or Aphrodite, was chiefly worshipped on the island) and the metal copper (the heavy mining of which gave Cyprus its name).
Coptic Christians preserved the shape of the ankh by sometimes representing the Christian cross with a circle in place of the upper bar. This is known as the Coptic ankh or crux ansata.
References
Notes
Bibliography
- Collier, Mark and Manley, Bill. How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
External links
- Media related to Ankh at Wikimedia Commons
Source of article : Wikipedia
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