Ankh

A god leans down and holds a small looped sign to the king’s nostrils. Nothing is poured and nothing is swallowed. The gesture repeats across temple walls and tomb chambers for three thousand years, and what changes hands, in the plainest possible reading, is air.

Egyptian scribes did not think of the ankh first as an emblem. They thought of it as a spelling. It was a triliteral sign, one picture standing for a run of three consonants, ꜥ-n-ḫ, and those three consonants sat inside a small cluster of unrelated words. They spelled the verb “live” and the noun “life”. They spelled sꜥnḫ, “cause to live”, which is also the word for nourishing someone. They spelled “oath”, because an Egyptian oath opened with a form of the word live. They spelled “mirror”. They spelled a kind of floral bouquet, and they spelled a looped rope-like object drawn in pairs at the foot of Middle Kingdom coffins, captioned as lying on the ground beneath the dead man’s feet. Any word carrying those sounds could be written with the same little picture, and the picture went on meaning all of them at once.

Which raises the question nobody has answered. What is it a picture of?

Battiscombe Gunn and Alan Gardiner, working in the early twentieth century, looked at those coffin illustrations and saw sandal straps: the loop passing round the ankle, the upright running down to the sole between the toes. Gardiner put the sign in his list at S34, filed among items of clothing, immediately after S33, which is a sandal. James Allen still uses it as the textbook demonstration of rebus writing in an introduction to Middle Egyptian published in 2014. Others have looked at the earliest versions of the sign, where the lower bar is drawn as two separate lengths of something soft trailing away, and seen a knot in cloth or reed, close kin to the tyet sign that meant protection. Heinrich Schäfer and Henry Fischer argued the two shapes had one origin, a knot tied for no practical purpose at all beyond being worn. Victor Loret argued for a mirror, then admitted the flaw himself: gods are constantly shown gripping the ankh by its loop, with their fingers passing straight through the space a reflecting disc would occupy. In 2004 the Egyptologist Andrew Gordon and the veterinarian Calvin Schwabe proposed something stranger, that the ankh, the djed and the was scepter are all cattle anatomy, drawn from the parts of a bull through which the Egyptians believed semen travelled: a thoracic vertebra, the sacrum with its lumbar vertebrae, and a dried bull’s penis. In the nineteenth century the amateur mythologist Thomas Inman had already decided it was male and female genitals fused into one glyph, which tells you rather more about the nineteenth century. One of the most recognisable objects on earth, and no one can say what it is a picture of.

What it does is much clearer. Life, in Egyptian thinking, was a single circulating force rather than a private possession, topped up and renewed each time the sun came back over the horizon and the world got made again. The gods who ran those cycles were the ones with life to give, so the ankh appears in their hands as a matter of course, and passes from their hands to the king. He stood in for the country, so the country was fed by the same gesture. Before the end of the Middle Kingdom, ordinary Egyptians were almost never shown holding one.

The sign slid easily into meaning air and water, the two things life plainly needed. Servants walking behind the pharaoh with long fans could be replaced in artwork by ankh signs that had sprouted arms and carried the fans themselves. In purification scenes, where cold water was poured over a king or a dead commoner from a tall vessel, the usual zigzag lines standing for the stream were sometimes swapped out for a chain of ankhs falling over the shoulders. The joke is not a joke. The water was life, so the water could simply be drawn as the word.

Because the sign spelled several things at once, craftsmen made objects in its shape whenever the pun held. Bouquets were tied into the outline. Libation vessels and sistra took the form. Mirrors were cast as ankhs, and so were the cases they lived in, which produced one of the tidiest objects to come out of the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter’s number 269b from Tutankhamun’s tomb, now Cairo JE 62349, a mirror case shaped like the sign that also spells the word for what went inside it.

Amulets are a stranger story. They begin late in the Old Kingdom and are still being made at the end of the first millennium BC, the earliest in gold or electrum, later ones overwhelmingly in faience glazed the blue or green of new growth and standing water. Given the importance of the symbol you would expect them everywhere. They are rare. Composite amulets that stack the ankh with the was and the djed turn out to be far more common, as though the single idea needed company. Two survive that are hard to forget. The Metropolitan Museum holds a faience ankh a little over twenty centimetres tall, its centre carrying the cartouche of Thutmose IV, found in that king’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The British Museum holds another from further south, glazed composition, twenty-three centimetres and a third of a kilo, dug from the Temple of Taharqo at Gebel Barkal in the Nubian capital of Napata. Its front carries a was scepter standing on a djed pillar with a kneeling heh figure above: life, endurance and dominion, for millions of years. It has no lug and no hole. Nobody wore it. Somebody walked with it.

Its limits are built into the way it is used. The ankh is always given and never taken. No text has a mortal reaching out and helping himself, and the sign does nothing by its own authority; an amulet cut in the shape of a hieroglyph worked by handing the wearer the quality the sign already meant, so the ankh’s whole power is borrowed from the word underneath it. Break the word and you have a loop on a stick.

Other people wanted it anyway. Syrian and Canaanite artists of the Middle Bronze Age borrowed more Egyptian motifs than they could reasonably use, and the ankh was easily the most popular, turning up beside figures on cylinder seals and pressed into service for water and fertility. Anatolian hieroglyphic writing took the shape and kept the meaning. Minoan artists on Crete worked it, or its relative the tyet, into designs alongside the double axe. Far up the Nile, the Meroitic kingdom put it on temples, on funerary art and on so much painted and stamped pottery that it became one of the signature marks of the ware.

Then Egypt turned Christian and the sign did not die with the temples. Copts kept it, rounding the teardrop loop into a circle, and used the resulting crux ansata heavily in textiles. The earliest known example sits in a copy of the Gospel of Judas from the third or early fourth century AD. Socrates of Constantinople reports that when Alexandria’s Serapeum was pulled apart in 391, the demolition crews found cross-shaped characters cut into the stone blocks, and that both sides immediately claimed them. Some converts who could still read the old script said the sign meant “life to come”. Everybody present treated this as a point scored.

The version most people now recognise is younger than that by fifteen centuries. The ankh came back into wide Western use in the 1960s, on the back of a general appetite for old religions, and has since served as an emblem of African cultural identity, as the badge of the Kemetic revival movements, and, thanks largely to a 1983 vampire film, as standard goth jewellery. None of that is ancient, and pretending otherwise does the actual object no favours. It has also been assigned two separate slots in Unicode, U+2625 among the miscellaneous symbols and U+132F9 in the hieroglyph block, which means the sign for life is now, in the most literal sense, encoded twice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ankh?

The ankh is an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph that spells the consonants ꜥ-n-ḫ, the sounds in the Egyptian words for “live” and “life”, and it became the standard symbol of life itself. It is shaped like a looped teardrop sitting on a crossbar above a vertical stem. It appears from the First Dynasty onward, roughly the thirtieth to twenty-ninth century BC.

What does the ankh symbol mean?

It means life, and by extension the air and water that sustain it. Because the same three consonants also spelled “mirror”, “bouquet” and “oath”, the sign was used to write those words too, and objects such as mirrors, mirror cases, libation vessels and sistra were often made in its shape. The English nickname “key of life” comes from the meaning, not from anything the Egyptians called it.

Why do Egyptian gods hold the ankh?

Egyptians understood life as a force the gods maintained and renewed, so the deities who governed natural cycles were the ones shown carrying the ankh. In temple and tomb art they hold it out to the pharaoh, often touching it to his nose to give him the breath of life, and because the king stood for Egypt as a whole, the gesture granted life to the entire country. Before the end of the Middle Kingdom, people other than the pharaoh were rarely shown receiving it.

What was the ankh originally a picture of?

Nobody knows, and Egyptologists have argued about it for more than a century. Alan Gardiner and Battiscombe Gunn thought it was a sandal strap, and Gardiner filed the sign directly after the hieroglyph for a sandal. Others have proposed a knot of cloth or reed related to the tyet sign, a mirror, or, in a 2004 argument by Andrew Gordon and Calvin Schwabe, a bull’s thoracic vertebra.

Is the ankh a Christian cross?

Not originally, but Egyptian Christians adapted it into one. Copts reshaped the teardrop loop into a circle to make the crux ansata and used it widely, especially on textiles, with the earliest known example appearing in a copy of the Gospel of Judas from the third or early fourth century AD. There is little evidence for its use in the western half of the Roman Empire.

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