Ankh

The single most useful thing to know about the ankh is that it is a piece of writing. In the Egyptian script it is the hieroglyph transliterated ankh and it means life. It is used in ordinary sentences, in names such as Tutankhamun, and in formulae wishing life to the king. It is not a badge that stands for a doctrine; it is a word that was also, conveniently, a good shape.

That grammatical status governs how it appears in Egyptian art. The most common scene is a deity holding an ankh by the loop and extending it to the nose of a king or a favoured dead person. This is not the transfer of a magical object. It is a picture of a sentence: the god gives life. Ranks of ankhs with arms hold up other signs; ankhs alternate with the djed pillar for stability and the was sceptre for dominion in decorative bands that read as a wish for a long, stable and powerful reign.

It appears from the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom period onward and remains in continuous use for some three thousand years, which makes it one of the longest-lived signs in the human record.

Egyptian mirrors were sometimes made in its shape, and mirror cases too, which is a pun on the word rather than a statement that mirrors mean life. Egyptian scribes enjoyed that kind of thing. Reading Egyptian symbolism without reading Egyptian grammar produces a great deal of confident nonsense, and the ankh is the sign it happens to most.

Nobody knows what the ankh depicts. This is the honest position and it is worth stating clearly, because the confident explanations are numerous and none of them is established.

Alan Gardiner, whose sign list remains the standard reference, suggested a sandal strap, the loop passing over the foot and the bar across it. Others have proposed a knotted girdle or sash, a stylised composite of the was and djed, a mirror, a sun rising over the horizon, and various anatomical readings. Each explanation accounts for some depictions and not others. The sign is attested long before any Egyptian text attempts to say what it shows, and no Egyptian text ever does.

Its afterlife is unusually eventful. Coptic Christians in Egypt adopted it as the crux ansata, the handled cross, and used it in manuscripts and church decoration, a straightforward reuse in which a native sign for life was read as compatible with a new claim about life. From there it entered Christian iconographic vocabulary in Egypt and Nubia.

Its modern circulation begins with the European rediscovery of Egypt and accelerates through nineteenth-century occultism, which had views about Egypt that Egypt would not have recognised. In the twentieth century it was taken up by Kemetic reconstructionist religion, by Black nationalist and Afrocentric movements as a sign of African antiquity, and, by an unrelated route, by the gothic subculture. None of these uses is illegitimate, but none of them is Egyptian, and the meanings assigned in each are supplied by the users.