The hieroglyphic script drew for its characters on objects of daily life. With a plant so abundant in Egypt as papyrus, or one so pretty as the lotus, we need not be surprised to find these too among the hieroglyphs.

Papyrus’s incorporation into the script was greatly facilitated by the fact that the Egyptian artists managed to develop a graceful, yet simple outline for the papyrus flower. Looking back at the photographs of the actual papyrus plant that we’ve just seen, we must admit that this was no small feat. The problem with this flower is, that it does not have an outline. Egyptian pictorial art however heavily relied for its effectiveness on the use of shape's outlines - so where really none existed, an outline had to be invented.
 

Nature…	…and Culture (from the heraldic pillars of Tuthmosis III at Karnak).

(Several other stylizings of both the papyrus flower and its buds were used  for papyrus columns: see the Visual Story about Columns & Pillars, elsewhere on this site).

The following are the most frequently used papyrus hieroglyphs:

As you can see, two of these three (M15 and M16) were (also) in use as determinative for the Delta region, or Lower Egypt.
 
The natural form of lotus flowers is easier to render than that of the papyrus flower. In the script, we find the following lotus signs:

(The flowers of M8 are modeled on the white lotus, those of M9 on the blue lotus. )

So unlike papyrus for Lower Egypt, the lotus was in the script not used to refer to Upper Egypt. Instead, Upper Egypt is in the script associated with the following signs:

*): Or more accurately: “He of the sedge and the bee”.

When we turn to the evidence of the earliest phase of the script (dynasties 1 and 2), we find very few (possible) lotus signs (see IÄF-III 134, 188 and 201), and those few seem to be related to Lower Egypt, not Upper Egypt.
Although the texts from that period are difficult to interpret, it seems that the connection of papyrus and sedge with Lower and Upper Egypt respectively is already fully developed - even if the distinction between M23 and M26 is not yet so rigorously applied as it will be later.

(Use of M23 in reference to Upper Egypt will later be restricted to applications in connection with the myth of the Upper Egyptian kingdom, while M26 will be the sign for Upper Egypt as a region (as opposed to a kingdom). We will come back to these matters shortly.)

In the meantime, we have a brand-new plant to check out.

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