The
ancient Egyptian Night hieroglyph,
Gardiner sign listed nos. N3 is a portrayal of the ''sky with the
'was' scepter hanging from it''; it is in the Gardiner subset for "sky, earth, and water".
In the
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 ...
, the ''night hieroglyph'' is used as a
determinative
A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may ...
for words relating to 'obscurity'. In the language it is used for ''grh''-(grḥ), and ''w(kh)''-(uḫ) for night, and ''kkw''-(kku) for dark, and a determinative for other related words.
[Betrò, 1995. ''Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt'', Sky, p. 150.]
See also
*
Sky (hieroglyph)
The ancient Egyptian Sky hieroglyph, (also translated as ''heaven'' in some texts, or iconography), is Gardiner sign listed no. N1, within the Gardiner signs for ''sky, earth, and water.''
The ''Sky'' hieroglyph is used like an Egyptian langu ...
*
Gardiner's Sign List#N. Sky, Earth, and Water
*
List of Egyptian hieroglyphs
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 ...
References
*Betrò, 1995. ''
Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt,'' Betrò, Maria Carmela, c. 1995, 1996-(English), Abbeville Press Publishers, New York, London, Paris (hardcover, )
Egyptian hieroglyphs: sky-earth-water
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