Relief with cartouche.
The ancient Egyptian Sky hieroglyph, (also translated as heaven in some texts, or iconography), is Gardiner sign listed no. N1, within the Gardiner signs for sky, earth, and water.
The Sky hieroglyph is used like an Egyptian language biliteral-(but is not listed there) and an ideogram in pt, "sky"; it is a determinative in other synonyms of sky. For the language value hrt, it has the phonetic value hry.[1]
The Sky hieroglyph is often written with the complement of its component values of "
p", and "t",
,
in a
hieroglyph composition block,
meaning
"pt", or commonly 'pet'.
Pt, with Gods and the Pharaoh
The Sky hieroglyph can be found in iconography with the gods, especially Ra as referencing the Lord of P(e)t, (Lord of Heaven), and the God's ownership of Pet. The Pharaoh is often equally named as the Lord of Pet.
Some ancient Egyptian names using the sky hieroglyph are Petosiris and the god Petbe.
Ligatured variants of Sky
The simple 'vault' of the sky hieroglyph has variants that are ligatured with it. Three of these are given separate entries in Gardiner's sign list:[2]
1
–The
Sky with 4 Props–Sky combined with 4 Props,
Used for word
i3dt, "dew";
determinative for
šnyt-(-
(sh)nyt), "rain".
2
–The
Sky with Was-staff–Sky with Staff,
Used for words meaning obscurity:
grh and
wh, for "night", and
kkw, for "dark".
3
–The
Sky with Oar-(for staff)
–Replacement:
Same as
Sky with Was-staff
The hieroglyphs used in the three ligatures are the Prop, Gardiner O30,
Was-staff, S40, and Oar, P8:
,
,
.
Why the sky hieroglyph is not a biliteral
Though the sky hieroglyph is used as pt, in the Coptic alphabet, for the Coptic language, (the follow-on to the Egyptian hieroglyphs), the spelling of the "sky" is "pe" in Coptic. Consequently, Budge's 2-volume dictionary lists the sky hieroglyph under "pe-t"[3]
In the short P word section in the Egyptian dictionaries, the end of the P's has the
pd, and
pdj. In the languages the d's and t's are listed together; they are the unaspirated and the aspirated. (See d, and dj, the hieroglyphs for "
hand" and "
cobra".) The
pd is represented by 'feet', and parts of them, and 'running', and the hieroglyph for 'extend', Gardiner no. T9-(similar to a bow),
(Many of the entries also refer to items about the bow, i.e. "stringing a bow", etc.) The
pdj then refers to bowmen, etc., and especially the
Nine bows. The archers of the 1350 BC
Amarna letters, the
archers (Egyptian pitati) get their name of 'pitati' from these related
pd words.
See also
References
- ↑ Betrò, 1995. Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt, section: Sky, p. 150.
- ↑ Betrò, 1995. Sky, p. 150.
- ↑ Budge, 1978, (1920). An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, entry pe-t, p. 229A.
- Betrò, 1995. Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt, Maria Carmela Betrò, c. 1995, 1996-(English), Abbeville Press Publishers, New York, London, Paris (hardcover, ISBN 0-7892-0232-8)
- Budge. An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, E.A.Wallace Budge, (Dover Publications), c 1978, (c 1920), Dover edition, 1978. (In two volumes) (softcover, ISBN 0-486-23615-3)
Relief
Hieroglyph-(using Sky hieroglyph)