The ancient Egyptian Hare hieroglyph, Gardiner sign listed no. E34 (𓃹) is a portrayal of the desert hare or

Cape hare The Cape hare (''Lepus capensis''), also called the brown hare and the desert hare, is a hare native to Africa and Arabia extending into India. Taxonomy The Cape hare was one of the many mammal species originally described by Carl Linnaeus ...

, ''Lepus capensis'' of

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Medit ...

, within the Gardiner signs for mammals. The ancients used the name of ''sekhat'' for the hare.

It is an

Egyptian language The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipher ...

biliteral with the value ''wn'', (or ''un''), often used in a hieroglyph composition block with the horizontal ''n''. E34:N35:N35 or E34:N35

The biliteral expresses the sound "oon", or "oonen",; it is also an

ideogram An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek "idea" and "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by famili ...

for the verb "to be", or "to exist",Schumann-Antelme, and Rossini, 1998, p. 232-233, p. 232. (i.e. "is", "are", "was", etc.). The famous Pharaoh

Unas Unas or Wenis, also spelled Unis ( egy, wnjs, hellenized form Oenas or Onnos), was a pharaoh, the ninth and last ruler of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt during the Old Kingdom. Unas reigned for 15 to 30 years in the mid- 24th century BC (circa ...

, (for his

Pyramid texts The Pyramid Texts are the oldest ancient Egyptian funerary texts, dating to the late Old Kingdom. They are the earliest known corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts. Written in Old Egyptian, the pyramid texts were carved onto the subterrane ...

), is named using the hare hieroglyph. It also appears in the name of

Wenamun The Story of Wenamun (alternately known as the Report of Wenamun, The Misadventures of Wenamun, Voyage of Unamūn, or nformallyas just Wenamun) is a literary text written in hieratic in the Late Egyptian language. It is only known from one incom ...

, a (possibly fictional) priest who appears in a famous history of c. 1000 BCE. } Image:Thutmose III and Hatshepsut.jpg,

Relief Relief is a sculptural method in which the sculpted pieces are bonded to a solid background of the same material. The term '' relief'' is from the Latin verb ''relevo'', to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that th ...

Image:Edfu51.JPG, Detail of ''Hare and water-ripple''

quadrat (hieroglyph block) A quadrat block (or ''quadrate block'') is a virtual rectangle or square in Egyptian hieroglyphic text. The glyphs (hieroglyphs) can be variable in number within the ''virtual block'', though they are often proportioned according to variable stand ...

(also shows

Stool-or-mat (hieroglyph) The total number of distinct Egyptian hieroglyphs increased over time from several hundred in the Middle Kingdom to several thousand during the Ptolemaic Kingdom. In 1928/1929 Alan Gardiner published an overview of hieroglyphs, Gardiner's sign ...

and Throne (hieroglyph)) Image:Cartouches Tibère.JPG, Vertical text, hare hieroglyph at beginning FIle:Stele of Amenhotep I.jpg, Partially missing lunette of a stela; Finely executed in shallow, incised- bas relief

References

*Schumann-Antelme, and Rossini, 1998. ''

Illustrated Hieroglyphics Handbook The ''Illustrated Hieroglyphics Handbook'' is part of a new genre of books focused on Egyptian hieroglyphs. The book is a graphics based book with four to seven word examples of each Egyptian hieroglyph; the words are graphically explained for e ...

'', Ruth Schumann-Antelme, and Stéphane Rossini. c 1998, English trans. 2002, Sterling Publishing Co. (Index, Summary lists (tables), selected uniliterals, biliterals, and triliterals.) (softcover, ) Leporidae Egyptian hieroglyphs: mammals {{AncientEgypt-stub

See also

References