Ankh

What it first pictured

No one knows for certain. Alan Gardiner, writing in 1915, argued that it drew a pair of sandal-strings: Middle Kingdom coffins show spare sandal-strings called by the same word, ankh. He saw no link in meaning between strings and life. The sign was borrowed, he thought, because the two words sounded alike, a common device in hieroglyphic writing. Other scholars, Muc notes, have proposed a magic knot, the so-called knot of Isis, an apron or loincloth, or a simplified female figure.

The same word, ankh, meant mirror, and Gardiner took that meaning to come from “to live”. Mirror cases could take the sign’s shape: among the objects Howard Carter listed from Tutankhamun’s tomb is a “mirror case in form of ankh sign”.

Is the ankh a Christian symbol?

It began as an Egyptian one, and became a Christian one in Egypt. Muc suggests the likeness to a cross helped, but its meaning mattered more: it stood for eternal life, and in Christian teaching Christ’s death on the cross opened the road to eternal life. Some stelae show the crux ansata beside another form of the cross, which suggests to her that Christians did not treat the two as simply the same.

Worn today

The ankh is widely made into necklaces and tattoos.

Among Black Americans it is worn as a symbol of Black culture, and the choice draws on a longer history. From the late 19th century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art says, Black Americans looked to ancient Egypt as evidence of a great ancient African culture, against an Egyptology that set Egypt apart from “Black Africa” and called it proto-European. The Met’s exhibition Flight into Egypt, which opened in November 2024, followed that engagement from 1876 to the present, and the Amsterdam News described it as a challenge to “racist, Eurocentric perspectives”.

In 2002 The FAMUAN, Florida A&M University’s student newspaper, reported the ankh spreading into tattoos and jewellery, helped by musicians such as Erykah Badu and Tupac Shakur. Badu has said the ankh has been “the staple in my music since 1997”: it was printed on her debut album, she wore one, and, she told Wax Poetics, “Millions of women after that had ankhs tattooed on their bodies”. For her, it is “an ancient Kemetic word that means life”. Her 2010 album is subtitled Return of the Ankh. On the memorial at the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York, the ankh is one of the symbols carved in the Circle of the Diaspora.

Goths took it up too. In the 1983 vampire film The Hunger, the vampires kill with blades hidden in ankh pendants, and the same Tallahassee piercing-shop owner the FAMUAN spoke to named goths as the other group who wear it. Neil Gaiman’s Death, from the Sandman comics, wears one; he based her on a waitress in black who “wore a big silver ankh on a silver necklace”.

In Kemetic Orthodoxy, a modern revival of Egyptian religion, the word lives on in the blessing “ankh, udja, seneb”, which the House of Netjer translates as “Life, prosperity, and health” and uses as a farewell.