amuletsWedjat eye𓂀

said WED-jat, from wḏꜣt, 'the sound one'

also: Eye of Horus · udjat · udjat eye · Horus eye amulet

amuletAncient EgyptNubia and SudanThe LevantEgypt Sudan Syria Lebanon Israel Palestine

A stylised human eye with a falcon's cheek-mark curling below it, cut or moulded small enough to string at the throat. Most surviving examples are faience — quartz paste, glazed blue-green in the kiln — and run a few centimetres across. Egypt made more of these than of any other amulet shape, for the living to wear and for the dead to be wrapped in.

cited

Egyptian wḏꜣt, feminine of wḏꜣ 'whole, sound, uninjured' — the eye after it was healed, not before
Egyptologists pair the left wedjat with the moon and the right with the sun; texts use the two almost interchangeably. cited

When

c. 2686 BCE – 641 CE cited

Period	Old Kingdom to Roman Egypt
How the date is known	excavated — dug up in a dated context
Note	The span the amulet is attested across, not the span of the myth. The sign outlives the amulet by two thousand years and counting, as jewellery.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Pendant
Made of	Faience · Carnelian · Lapis lazuli · Gold · Glass
Goes	At the neck · On the chest, under the shirt · In the grave
Made by	workshops attached to temples and to the embalming trade; no restriction on who could wear one
Colour	blue-green · red · blue
Retired	no — it is kept
Note	Sizes range from a bead to a pectoral; this project has not read a published measurement to quote.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named citedsaid by Egyptian religious texts, as summarised by Egyptologiststhe sign stands for well-being and healing before it stands for anything else
Danger to the dead — charms put in a grave for the person in it citedsaid by Egyptian funerary practicepainted on coffins, wrapped into mummies, laid over the embalming incision
The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one traditionsaid by later Mediterranean use of the same shapethe eye-against-the-eye logic is Mediterranean-wide; reading it back into pharaonic Egypt is a later gloss, so it is hedged here

The story

The eye comes out of a fight. Set tears out Horus's eye; Thoth, or another god, puts it back; Horus gives the restored eye to his dead father Osiris, and the offering keeps Osiris going in the afterlife. That is why the sign stands for an offering as much as for an eye, and why it turns up on temple walls beside the meat and bread.

As an amulet it runs from the Old Kingdom to the Roman period — roughly 2686 BCE to the seventh century CE, which is close to three thousand years of continuous use, and the longest run of any object in this atlas. Coffins of the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom carry a pair of eyes painted on the side, positioned so the mummy inside could look out through them. Boats carried them on the bows. Tradition holds — the eye also travelled: Syria, Canaan and especially Nubia took the sign up from Egypt, and Nubian versions are common enough that a museum tray of them is rarely all Egyptian.

Inference — the arithmetic on the shelf is worth stating plainly. An object that was cheap to mould, buried by the thousand, and made of a material that does not rot is an object that survives; the reed, cloth and dough charms that stood beside it did not. What a museum drawer holds is a record of what lasts, not a census of what Egypt wore.

cited

How it is made and carried

Moulded in faience or cut from carnelian, lapis, gold or glass, pierced at the top or through the back, and strung. Size was the variable, not the design — the same eye scaled from a bead to a pectoral. In mummification the eye went into the wrappings, and one class of it covered the embalmer's incision.

cited

Now

Nobody makes a wedjat as a wedjat any more in Egypt's ancient sense; the practice ended with the religion. It is made by the million as jewellery, sold in Cairo, Luxor and every airport shop that sells to Egypt's visitors, and worn worldwide by people with no connection to Osiris. As of 2026 the sign is also standard tattoo flash. Whether the mass-market version is the same object is an argument this atlas reports and does not settle.

inference

Where you can see one

The British Museum — wedjat amulets in the Egyptian collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — wedjat amulets in the Egyptian galleries
The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology — Petrie's excavated amulet series

An accession number appears here only where it was read off a catalogue page that is linked. No link, no number.

Not to be confused with

Nazar — the wedjat is a drawn eye with a falcon's cheek-line; the nazar is a concentric blue-and-white glass disc with no lid and no brow
Scarab — if the back is a beetle and the flat underside carries a name or a spell, it is a scarab, whatever is cut on the other face

What this is near

motifThe eyethe sign this amulet carries, and the oldest dated member of the family that runs from here to a glass bead in Istanbul contrastScarabthe other amulet Egypt made by the thousand; the scarab went under the wrappings at the heart, the eye over the incision kinHeart scarabits partner in the wrappings — one guards the body's opening, the other speaks for the dead at the weighing materialFaiencethe material that made it cheap enough to bury by the thousand, and durable enough to still be here materialCarnelianthe red stone version, cut rather than moulded, and costlier traditionEgyptian amulet craftthe tradition that produced it, on a scale no other ancient practice matches kinAnkh amuletmade in the same workshops and strung on the same cords, for life rather than for soundness parallelNazarthe eye answering the eye, four thousand years later and in glass rather than faience practiceGrave depositthe practice that is the reason this amulet survives at all personFlinders Petriethe excavator who sorted Egypt's amulets into the classes museums still use

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

contrastAnkh amuletmade in the same workshops and strung on the same cords, and far more often — the eye is what Egypt actually wore kinCippus of Horusthe eye of the same god, worn small; this is the god himself as a child, carved large and rinsed kinHeart scarabits partner in the wrappings: one speaks for the dead at the weighing, the other guards the cut the embalmer made parallelNazarthe same argument four thousand years earlier, drawn in faience instead of blown in glass contrastScarabthe other amulet Egypt made by the thousand; the eye went over the embalmer's incision, the scarab over the heart carriesEgyptian amulet craftthe shape this tradition made more of than any other, for the living and for the dead carried-byThe eyethe oldest dated amulet in this family, and the one that fixes the sign's shape for three thousand years carried-byThe spiralcarries the sign as a tail — the curl below the eye that Wilkinson traces to a cheetah's markings materialCarnelianthe eye ground out of this stone rather than pressed from paste — the costlier half of the same tray materialFaiencethe amulet this material made cheap enough to bury by the thousand, and durable enough to still be here kinGlassthe Egyptian amulet that shared a string with the first spotted glass beads, from the thirteenth century BCE carried-byGrave depositthe amulet Egypt buried in the greatest numbers, and the reason museum trays of it are so deep carriesThe Egyptian galleries, the Metropolitan Museum of Artthe amulet this walk is really about — seven galleries of them, in faience, carnelian, obsidian and gold kinFlinders Petrieone of the classes his 1914 catalogue fixed, and the amulet his excavations turned up by the thousand carriesThe British Museumheld here in quantity — the Egyptian amulet the collection has most of carriesThe Metropolitan Museum of Artheld here and photographed here, under a licence that lets this atlas reproduce the photograph carriesPetrie's amulet platesthe class that fills the most rows on these plates, because Egypt made more of it than of anything else carriesDating a charmthe longest single excavated span in the atlas, and the record that says why a faience amulet survives when a dough one does not contrastThe eye everywherea different eye with its own religion behind it, kept separate here on purpose

Where this came from

Eye of Horus — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Amulet — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Egyptian faience — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Evil eye — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
British Museum — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Metropolitan Museum of Art — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16

Elsewhere

Eye of Horus — Wikipedia

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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