Ancient Egypt
Elements of its Cultural History

  by Sjef Willockx

  
 


25. The names of the heraldic plants in hieroglyphs

Before we attempt to identify the heraldic plants, we will take a look at the names that the ancient Egyptians themselves gave to them.

We now run into a major disadvantage of the hieroglyphic script. Each hieroglyph being a picture, it remained at all times possible to use a depiction of an object in the sense of a character. To refer in a text to the heraldic plant of Upper or Lower Egypt, it sufficed to draw a small picture of it, and include that into the sentence. See e.g. the text of Ramesses II on his Sma Tawy from the Luxor temple (in section 20). In the translation that I gave there, I simply replaced the two signs shown with the words “lotus and papyrus”. Another case in point is the expression “the land of the sedge, and the land of papyrus” that we saw in section 18: “The heraldic plants in the script”. Although my translations refer in one case to the lotus, and in the other to the sedge, it is not per se evident that the Egyptians had two different plants in mind - and least of all, that one of these was a lotus (be it Nymphaea lotus or  Nymphaea caerulea), and  the other a sedge.

In the rare cases where the Egyptians found it necessary to give the heraldic plant of Upper Egypt a name of its own, they simply referred to it with sign M26:
(see Wb. 4, 477.9-11)

So used on its own, this sign could mean, depending on the context:

§         Upper Egypt (see section 16: “The Two Lands, their symbols, and their names”),

§         or: the heraldic plant of Upper Egypt.

The heraldic plant of Lower Egypt is in most cases referred to as wAD, although other designations for papyrus are sometimes used as well (see section 9).

 


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