เครื่องรางเครื่องรางอังค์Ankh amulet𓋹

The ankh is everywhere in Egyptian art and rare as an amulet, and the gap is the interesting part. Amulets cut in the shape of a hieroglyph were meant to hand the wearer whatever the sign meant, and this sign meant life itself; yet ankh-shaped amulets first appear only late in the Old Kingdom, around 2700 to 2200 BCE, and stay uncommon right through to the late first millennium BCE. The composite amulet — ankh, was and djed run together, 'life, dominion and stability' — was more widespread than the ankh on its own.

On walls the sign is a thing gods hold. They carry it by the loop, they hold it up to the king's nose as the breath of life, and in scenes of purification the zigzag lines that usually mean water are replaced by chains of ankhs poured over the king's head. Before the end of the Middle Kingdom almost nobody but the pharaoh is shown receiving one. Because the same three consonants spelled 'mirror' and 'floral bouquet', mirrors, mirror cases and bouquets were made in the sign's shape.

It travelled. Syria and Canaan took it up in the Middle Bronze Age, about 1950 to 1500 BCE, and of all the Egyptian hieroglyphs they borrowed it was by far the most common. Anatolian hieroglyphs absorbed it for the word 'life'. Minoan artists on Crete combined it, or the related tyet, with the double axe. Meroitic Nubia used it heavily in temples, in funerary art and on pottery. A clay seal of King Hezekiah of Judah, about 700 BCE, found in Jerusalem in 2015, carries ankhs on either side of a winged sun.

Then Christianity kept it. When Christians were pulling down the Serapeum in Alexandria in 391 CE, according to Socrates of Constantinople, cross-like signs turned up cut into the stone blocks; the pagans present said the sign meant 'life to come' and the Christians said the sign was theirs. Egyptian Coptic Christians used the crux ansata in many media, especially on textiles. There is little evidence for it in the western half of the Roman Empire.

Cut from gold or electrum in the earliest examples, moulded in faience later — that ceramic is usually blue or green, and the colour is read as life and regeneration, which may be why it took over. Pierced and strung, or built into the composite ankh-was-djed amulet. On a wall it is painted blue or black.

Worn worldwide. The sign came back through the counterculture of the 1960s and its interest in ancient religions, and it is now a standard design for jewellery and tattoos. People of African descent in the United States and Europe wear it as a sign of African cultural identity; Kemetism, a group of movements built on the religion of ancient Egypt, uses it as its symbol; the goth subculture adopted it, tied to vampires, after an ankh pendant featured in the 1983 film The Hunger. In the twenty-first century it is the most widely recognised symbol of Egyptian, and more broadly of African, origin in the Western world. Unicode encodes it twice: U+2625 ☥ and U+132F9 𓋹.