Sky (hieroglyph)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
N1
Sky
(heaven)
in hieroglyphs
Relief with cartouche.

The

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",
Q3
,
X1
in a hieroglyph composition block
,
N1
Q3 X1
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]


2–The Sky with
Was
-staff–Sky with Staff,
N2
Used for words meaning obscurity: grh and wh, for "night", and kkw, for "dark".


3–The Sky with Oar-(for staff)–Replacement:
N3
Same as Sky with Was-staff


The hieroglyphs used in the three ligatures are the Prop, Gardiner O30,
Was
-staff, S40, and Oar, P8:
O30
,
S40
,
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 "
archers (Egyptian pitati)
get their name of 'pitati' from these related pd words.
Preceded by
Q3

unileral
-P
(start of P's)
N1

sky-("heaven")
"pt" 		Succeeded by
G40

Bird in flight
p3-(pa)
  • Relief
    Relief
  • Pyramidion
    Pyramidion
  • Temple of Hatshepsut
    Temple of Hatshepsut
  • Hieroglyph-(using Sky hieroglyph)
    Hieroglyph-(using Sky hieroglyph)

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Category:Sky (pt hieroglyph).

References

  1. ^ Betrò, 1995. Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt, section: Sky, p. 150.
  2. ^ Betrò, 1995. Sky, p. 150.
  3. ^ Budge, 1978, (1920). An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, entry pe-t, p. 229A.
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