The ankh (☥) — the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "life," later adapted by early Coptic Christians into a looped cross called the crux ansata. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
The ankh (☥, U+2625) is an ancient Egyptian symbol meaning "life" or "to live." It was more than an icon: in the hieroglyphic writing system it was a genuine sign — catalogued as S34 in Gardiner's Sign List — that spelled the triliteral consonant sequence ꜥ-n-ḫ (ankh), the Egyptian word for life. In tomb and temple art it appears held by deities and offered to pharaohs, a gesture representing the gift of life and revival in the afterlife. Unicode placed it in the Miscellaneous Symbols block as part of Unicode 1.1 in 1993. A well-documented turn in its history came in Egypt's Coptic period: as Christianity spread there, some early Coptic Christians adapted the ankh's looped shape into a form of the Christian cross known as the crux ansata — Latin for "cross with a handle." Today the ankh also circulates in secular and spiritual settings — as jewelry, in tattoo art, and within modern Kemetic (revived ancient Egyptian) practice. This page reports that history as documented, without asserting any modern ownership of the symbol.
The ankh dingbat and the cross forms its looped shape is historically linked to.
Emoji commonly associated with ancient Egypt and the imagery the ankh appears among.
Other single-glyph spiritual and protective symbols the ankh is often searched alongside.
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Open UltraTextGen →The full hieroglyphic writing system the ankh (sign S34) belongs to.
The Christian cross whose early "crux ansata" form grew directly out of the ankh's looped shape in Coptic Egypt.
Another ancient life-and-protection symbol reported as documented history, without picking a side.