The ancient Egyptian Bone-with-meat hieroglyph (

Gardiner Gardiner may refer to: Places Settlements ;Canada * Gardiner, Ontario ;United States * Gardiner, Maine * Gardiner, Montana * Gardiner (town), New York ** Gardiner (CDP), New York * Gardiner, Oregon * Gardiner, Washington * West Gardiner, Maine ...

F44) represented: "ancestry, inherit", and phonetic ''isw, iw' '' (inherit, etc.); a

determinative A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they ma ...

for the

femur The femur (; ), or thigh bone, is the proximal bone of the hindlimb in tetrapod vertebrates. The head of the femur articulates with the acetabulum in the pelvic bone forming the hip joint, while the distal part of the femur articulates wit ...

, (iw'); and ''swt'', for the

tibia The tibia (; ), also known as the shinbone or shankbone, is the larger, stronger, and anterior (frontal) of the two bones in the leg below the knee in vertebrates (the other being the fibula, behind and to the outside of the tibia); it connects ...

.Kamrin, 2004. F44, p. 238. The

Old Kingdom In ancient Egyptian history, the Old Kingdom is the period spanning c. 2700–2200 BC. It is also known as the "Age of the Pyramids" or the "Age of the Pyramid Builders", as it encompasses the reigns of the great pyramid-builders of the Fourt ...

usage on slab steles, from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, shows the proto-type form of the hieroglyph as a 'cut of meat', much like the

spare ribs Spare ribs (also side ribs or spareribs) are a variety of ribs cut from the lower portion of a pig, specifically the belly and breastbone, behind the shoulder, and include 11 to 13 long bones. There is a covering of meat on top of the bones an ...

or beef ribs of the present era. The slab stela shows the bone as a multiple of two curved bones, much like the spare rib. An example of a wall relief scene from

Edfu Edfu ( egy, bḥdt, ar, إدفو , ; also spelt Idfu, or in modern French as Edfou) is an Egyptian city, located on the west bank of the Nile River between Esna and Aswan, with a population of approximately sixty thousand people. Edfu is the sit ...

at the

Temple of Edfu The Temple of Edfu is an Egyptian temple located on the west bank of the Nile in Edfu, Upper Egypt. The city was known in the Hellenistic period in grc-koi, Ἀπόλλωνος πόλις and in Latin as ''Apollonopolis Magna'', after the chief g ...

shows a

cartouche In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. The first examples of the cartouche are associated with pharaohs at the end of the Third Dynasty, but the fe ...

with the ''joint of meat'' hieroglyph. Another less common hieroglyph pictured within the cartouche is the vertical standing ''mummy hieroglyph.''

References

*Budge. ''The Rosetta Stone,'' E.A.Wallace Budge, (Dover Publications), c 1929, Dover edition(unabridged), 1989. (softcover, ) *Kamrin, 2004. '' Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Practical Guide'', Janice Kamrin, c 2004, Harry N. Abrams, Publisher, (hardcover, {{ISBN, 0-8109-4961-X) Egyptian hieroglyphs: parts of mammals

See also

References