SYM·0097 · Wedjat
Eye of Horus
encoded, and unrenderable
- Unicode
- U+13080 egyptian hieroglyph d010
- Meaning
- Wholeness and protection: the eye torn out and made whole again.
- History
- Set tears out Horus’s eye; Thoth restores it, and the restored eye — the wedjat, meaning the sound or whole one — becomes the standard protective amulet, placed on the living and on the dead. Its meaning is not vision but repair.
- Variants
- This plate is also a demonstration. The character is properly encoded and will render as a blank box on most systems, because Egyptian hieroglyphs ship with almost no font. Encoded is not the same as available — a distinction the Atlas’s Unicode field cannot otherwise show.
- Related
- 目 the Eye archetype; ☥ Ankh.
- Appears
- Egyptian amulets and coffins, ship prows, and modern jewellery and tattoos.
- Evolution
- Myth of injury and repair → protective amulet → a general-purpose emblem of ancient Egypt.
Sources · 3
- documented The wedjat in Egyptian funerary amulets and the Horus–Set myth cycle.
- documented The Unicode Standard, Egyptian Hieroglyphs block; and the near-total absence of system fonts covering it.
- traditional That the parts of the eye represent the fractions ½ to ¹⁄₆₄, summing to ⁶³⁄₆₄. Proposed in early twentieth-century scholarship, repeated everywhere since, and substantially doubted by later Egyptologists.