Ancient Egyptian Symbols: A Guide to Signs, Gods and Amulets

Ancient Egyptian visual culture is full of signs that modern jewellery still borrows: hieroglyphs, divine emblems, royal insignia and amulets. They were never a single code. Some signs are words, some depict gods, some are marks of kingship, and some are amulets with a specific ritual purpose. Knowing which is which is the key to reading them.

How Egyptian symbols worked

An Egyptian sign could do several things at once. The same shape might be a hieroglyph in a written text, an image on a temple wall and an amulet placed in a mummy's wrappings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that an amulet's power was thought to come from several things together: its shape, its decoration, any inscription, its colour, its material and the ritual in which it was used.

Signs of the person

• Ka: a pair of raised arms, the sign for the ka, one of the aspects through which Egyptians understood a person's vital, enduring self.
• Ib: the heart, seat of thought, memory and moral character, weighed at the judgement of the dead.

Signs of protection and kingship

• Sa: one of the Egyptian signs genuinely meaning "protection", worn as an amulet and held by the goddess Taweret.
• Uraeus: the rearing cobra on the king's brow, linked with the goddess Wadjet.
• Sema-Tawy: the binding of lotus and papyrus around the sign for union, meaning the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt.

The world beyond death

• Duat: the netherworld crossed by the dead and by the sun each night, written with a star inside a circle.

Goddesses

• Hathor: goddess of love, joy and music, shown as a cow or wearing cow horns around a sun disk.
• Mut: the mother goddess of Thebes, whose name means "mother".
• Satet: the goddess of Elephantine at Egypt's southern frontier.

Reading Egyptian symbols today

Modern charts often reduce Egyptian signs to single words such as "strength", "energy" or "protection". The evidence is richer and more specific: a royal cobra is not a heart hieroglyph, and a goddess is not an amulet. The stories above start from what each sign actually was, which is also what makes them worth wearing.

AURYN's Egyptian designs can be found in the charms collection.