Hieroglyphs Addenda · Signs

𓄿

vulture

NameG1
Reads
MeansEgyptian vulture
Taught in04 · Your first signs

Where it comes from

The Egyptian vulture — a real species, Neophron percnopterus, with the naked face and shaggy ruff the sign still draws. It writes , the glottal catch conventionally read as “a”: the sound at the start of a cough, carried by a carrion bird.

How to remember it

The vulture opens its beak and what comes out is barely a sound — , the catch in the throat. Big bird, smallest of noises: that mismatch is the memory.

In the wild

Old Kingdom tomb-scene caption (aes corpus). urn:nabu:aes:bbawgrabinschriften:2PGN6CK4QBEKNEP7VZX3WBVXSY:IBUBd8PxTjqTAkthkbPkGuGBHcI · license: attribution. The mold-word's spelling is compressed on the wall, as captions often are.

Piece by piece:

  • qr — heating, stacked in the oven
  • bḏꜣ — the bread-mold, its vulture carrying the final ꜣ

A bakery scene painted in a tomb, labeled by the painter — the vulture at work in a word for kitchenware. The sign is taught in 101’s chapter 04.