The Ankh, Egypt's Sign of Life: History of a Symbol

Of all the signs of ancient Egypt, none has survived with such success as the ankh, the cross topped by a loop that now appears on jewellery, book covers and tattoos. In hieroglyphic writing the sign spelled the word meaning “life” and, together with the verb “to live”, it entered wishes, personal names and royal titles. To understand its value as an amulet, however, one must begin with its use in language and imagery, even before looking at the objects people wore.

A sign of uncertain origin

The origin of the shape is debated. The British Egyptologist Alan Gardiner, in his classification of hieroglyphs, placed it among items of clothing and interpreted it as a sandal strap, a hypothesis many accept but which has not been proven. Other scholars have suggested a ritual knot or a more abstract symbolic object. What is certain is that the sign already appears in the Protodynastic period and that its meaning, tied to life in the fullest sense, remained stable for some three thousand years.

Life given by the gods

In temple reliefs and tomb paintings the gods hold the ankh by its loop or bring it to the king's nose, a gesture expressing the gift of the breath of life. The king, in turn, is often described as “given life”, a phrase that accompanies many cartouches. In the Amarna period, under Akhenaten, the rays of the solar disc Aten end in small hands offering the ankh to the royal family, an eloquent image of life descending directly from the sun.

The sign also appears together with other emblems, such as the djed pillar and the was sceptre, forming true visual phrases of good wishes: life, stability and power. These groups decorated lintels, furniture and burial goods, where the repetition of the motif had both an ornamental and a protective value. The same trio recurs in royal titularies and in the dedicatory inscriptions of temples.

From hieroglyph to object

As an amulet in the strict sense, the ankh is less common than one might think: the scarab and the wedjat eye are far more frequent in burials. There are, however, pendants in faience, gold and hardstones, and above all objects that take up its shape. From the tomb of Tutankhamun comes a mirror case shaped like an ankh, a deliberate pun, because in Egyptian a mirror could be called by the same word. In tombs, moreover, the sign often accompanies the formulas wishing the deceased to breathe and live for ever.

A Christian and modern legacy

After Egypt became Christian, the Copts adopted the sign as the crux ansata, the handled cross, seeing in the life evoked by the ancient symbols a foreshadowing of the eternal life announced by the Gospel. The ankh thus appears on funerary stelae and Coptic textiles of the first centuries of the Christian era. In modern times the symbol was taken up by nineteenth-century Egyptomania and then by twentieth-century popular culture, often detached from its original context.

To read the ankh as a mere lucky charm is therefore to impoverish it. For the Egyptians it was a word before it was an image, and a word that meant something concrete: breath, nourishment, the continuity of existence beyond death. To carry it was to keep before one's eyes, in visible form, the simplest and broadest wish that civilisation knew.