Hieroglyphs Addenda · Signs
viper
| Name | I9 |
|---|---|
| Reads | f |
| Means | horned viper |
| Taught in | 04 · Your first signs |
Where it comes from
The horned viper — Cerastes, the desert snake with two little horns over its eyes, drawn resting. It writes f, which makes it the suffix pronoun ≡f, “he, his, him”: no sign in the script is attached to more kings.
How to remember it
The viper hisses f — a snake sound if ever there was one — and then coils at the end of words as “his”: his house, his majesty, his life. Small, horned, and possessive.
In the wild
urn:nabu:aes:bbawamarna:AHWOVKY54FDQ3IG3XIPVIBY7DM:IBUBdQNyVsBq10VRri8gWAqV3jo
· license: attribution.
Piece by piece:
- ḏd — says: cobra and hand
- ≡f — he: this viper, doing its pronoun duty
The commonest two words in Egyptian narration — someone speaks, and the viper says who. The suffix pronouns are taught in 101’s chapter 04 and put to work in 102’s chapter 02.