The

ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...

ian Shuti, a ''two-feather adornment'' for crowns, is part of a series of

hieroglyph Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. ...

s for "crowns"; usage as a hieroglyph is not as common as the actual crown represented in Egyptian art, and artworks. One popular use of the ''Shuti, two-feather crown'' is by the deity

Amun Amun was a major ancient Egyptian deity who appears as a member of the Hermopolitan Ogdoad. Amun was attested from the Old Kingdom together with his wife Amunet. His oracle in Siwa Oasis, located in Western Egypt near the Libyan Desert, r ...

, one of his many crowns he is portrayed wearing. The tail feathers in this crown are generally straight, and are assumed to be the tail feathers of a falcon. They can be compared to the ostrich features in the Atef crown of

Osiris Osiris (, from Egyptian ''wikt:wsjr, wsjr'') was the ancient Egyptian deities, god of fertility, agriculture, the Ancient Egyptian religion#Afterlife, afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He was ...

, or the single ostrich feather that symbolizes

Maat Maat or Maʽat ( Egyptian: ''mꜣꜥt'' /ˈmuʀʕat/, Coptic: ⲙⲉⲓ) comprised the ancient Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Maat was also the goddess who personified these concepts, and regul ...

. The ''shuti hieroglyph'' and crown may be based upon Maat's ostrich feather, the single curved-top "shu-feather" hieroglyph. It is shown in

iconography Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct fro ...

in both the straight-feather form (when used as a doubled crown). However, the straight feathers of Amun's crown are thought to be falcon feathers. The Budge two-volume dictionary of hieroglyphs records 20 spellings for ''shuti'', from multiple sources.Budge. ''An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary,'' E.A.Wallace Budge, p. 733B, volume II. Besides the single hieroglyph, nine spellings use the shuti as 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 ...

. Most spellings use the ''Shu-feather'', often twice, the feather being the representation, and feather of

. Maat as a representative of truth, wisdom, justice, order, etc., in the kingdom, the

iconographic Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visu ...

headdress implies her role, to the one who wears the ''shuti two-feather adornments''.

References

* Budge. ''An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary,'' E.A.Wallace Budge, (Dover Publications), c 1978, (c 1920), Dover edition, 1978. (In two volumes) (softcover, )

See also

References

Further reading