Ankh

The ankh is a cross with a loop at the top. In Egyptian hieroglyphs it stands for the word ꜥnḫ, which means life. It is one of the most frequently depicted symbols in all of Egyptian art, held by gods, carved on temple walls, painted on coffins, cast in gold for royal jewelry, and pressed into clay for amulets buried with the dead.

In relief sculpture and painting, the scene repeats across three thousand years with minimal variation. A deity, often Isis or Amun or Hathor, holds the ankh by its loop and extends it toward the face of a pharaoh or a deceased person. The ankh touches or approaches the nose and mouth. The gesture means the giving of breath, the giving of life.

What the shape is

Nobody knows for certain what object the ankh depicts. Alan Gardiner, whose Egyptian Grammar remains the standard reference for hieroglyphic sign classification, catalogued it as Sign S34 and described it as a kind of knot, without identifying the original object. Several theories compete.

Wolfhart Westendorf proposed in 1983 that the ankh derives from a sandal strap. The loop would fit around the ankle, the vertical bar would run up the foot, and the crossbar would represent the straps extending to either side. The word for sandal strap in Egyptian is phonetically close to ꜥnḫ, which supports the connection.

Andrew Gordon and Calvin Schwabe offered a different reading in their 2004 book The Quick and the Dead. They argued that the ankh represents a thoracic vertebra seen from above. The spinal canal forms the loop, the transverse processes form the crossbar, and the spinous process forms the vertical bar. Cattle vertebrae, which the Egyptians handled frequently in butchery and ritual, fit the shape closely.

A third candidate is the knot of Isis, called the tyet, which resembles an ankh with its arms folded down. The tyet and the ankh appear together on amulets and coffins. Some scholars consider them variants of the same original sign, one for life and one for the protection of Isis.

The honest answer is that the shape was so old by the time Egyptians started writing about it that they may not have known its origin either.

Life and mirror

The word ꜥnḫ has a secondary meaning in Egyptian: mirror. Egyptian hand mirrors from the Middle Kingdom onward were made in the shape of the ankh, with a polished metal disc at the loop and a handle at the vertical bar. The overlap between life and mirror is probably not a coincidence. Seeing one’s reflection was connected to the concept of the ka, the vital double, the aspect of the self that survived death.

In tomb decoration, the ankh appears in contexts that span the gap between this world and the next. It marks doorways. It accompanies scenes of offering. It is held by the gods who preside over judgment in the Hall of Two Truths. When Anubis weighs the heart of the deceased against the feather of Ma’at, the ankh is present in the hands of the deities who watch.

The Coptic cross

When Christianity entered Egypt, the ankh came with it. Coptic Christians, who are the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptian population, adopted the ankh as their version of the cross. They called it the crux ansata, the cross with a handle, and read the loop as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection and eternal life.

The transition was not a radical break. The ankh already meant life and life beyond death. Coptic artisans carved it onto church lintels, wove it into textiles, and cast it into liturgical objects. In some early Coptic churches, the ankh and the Chi-Rho (the Christogram) appear side by side on the same wall. The old symbol accommodated the new theology without losing its shape.

Modern Coptic churches still use the ankh-cross in their iconography. It is one of the few cases where a symbol passed directly from pharaonic religion into a living Christian tradition without interruption.

Related reading

• Eye of Horus. The other great Egyptian protective symbol, with its own journey from temple walls to modern amulets.
• Ouroboros. Another Egyptian symbol that entered the Western esoteric tradition through Hellenistic Alexandria.
• Isis. The goddess most frequently shown holding the ankh, whose cult carried Egyptian symbolism across the Roman world.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Pyramid Texts (c. 2400–2300 BCE, Old Kingdom) — earliest textual references to the ankh as ’life'
• Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (1927, 3rd ed. 1957) — Sign-list S34, classification and phonetic value
• Andrew Gordon and Calvin Schwabe, The Quick and the Dead (2004) — thoracic vertebra theory of ankh origin
• Wolfhart Westendorf, ‘Zur Deutung des Lebenszeichens’ in Göttinger Miszellen (1983) — sandal strap theory