Hieroglyphs Addenda · Signs

𓅪

smallness

Where it comes from

A sparrow — round tail, hunched little body. Silent: it classifies smallness, weakness, badness, ruin. To the granary culture that fed Egypt, the seed-stealing sparrow was the fitting mascot for everything going wrong.

How to remember it

Smallness with feathers: where the good gods get falcons, trouble gets the sparrow. If a word carries this bird, the news is bad, weak, or shrinking — brace before you translate. Its lookalike, the swallow of G36, means the opposite: watch the tail.

In the wild

From a funerary liturgy against Apophis (aes corpus). urn:nabu:aes:bbawtotenlit:A2PTGDCYB5E4XK6OORW6V4QHOE:IBUBd4WnAWIbCEq9rLuvQoItCB4 · license: attribution.

Piece by piece:

  • nn wnn≡k — you shall not exist: the hare-verb of being, refused
  • dm.ṱ — annihilated: and the sparrow perches on the ruin

The enemy shrinks to nothing, sparrow-marked. The classifier is taught in 101’s chapter 09.

Easily confused

SignNameKey
𓅨 G36 elder