A sign carved across ancient Egypt
Among the hundreds of signs that make up Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, one is instantly recognizable far beyond Egyptology circles: the ankh, 𓋹. In the sign list established by British Egyptologist Alan Gardiner - still the reference used today to classify hieroglyphs - this sign carries the code S34, filed among objects related to clothing and regalia. Its shape, an oval loop resting on a cross with a horizontal bar, decorates thousands of temples, tombs, stelae, and funerary objects from the very first dynasties (Early Dynastic Period, c. 3000 BCE) through the Greco-Roman period: well over three millennia of continuous use.
The exact origin of the shape is still debated. The most common hypothesis reads it as a sandal strap seen from the side, with the loop corresponding to the part tied around the ankle. German Egyptologist Heinrich Schäfer, together with American Egyptologist Henry Fischer, instead saw it as a knot of cloth or reed, sharing a common origin with the tyet sign. Others, such as the 19th-century amateur mythologist Thomas Inman, read it as a stylized combination of male and female symbols - an interpretation that has not persuaded Egyptologists. None of these theories has won unanimous support - what is certain is the value the sign carries once it appears in a text.
What the ankh actually means
The sign is read ˁnḫ (conventionally vocalized "ankh" by Egyptologists, since Egyptian writing did not note vowels), and it is used to write both the verb "to live" and the noun "life." It appears throughout omnipresent funerary and religious formulas, such as "may he live" (ˁnḫ) attached to a king's name, or in the epithet "given life," which regularly accompanies pharaohs' names on monuments.
In religious iconography, the ankh is almost never a mere ornament: it is a divine attribute. Countless temple reliefs show a deity - Amun, Ra, Hathor, Isis - holding the sign by its loop and presenting it to the pharaoh's nostrils, a gesture symbolizing the breath of life transmitted by the gods to the ruler. The ankh also frequently appears alongside the djed pillar (a symbol of stability) and the was scepter (a symbol of power); together, these three signs form a very common visual formula wishing "life, stability, power" upon whoever the image represents.
From pharaonic Egypt to the modern world
The sign found a second life that spilled beyond pharaonic religion already in late antiquity: starting in the fourth century, Egyptian Christians - the Copts - adapted its shape into a "crux ansata," fusing the pharaonic symbol of eternal life with Christian resurrection imagery, a well-documented case of symbolic continuity between the two religions.
Closer to our own time, the ankh was picked up in the twentieth century by Western esoteric movements (Theosophy, Rosicrucianism), then by the 1960s-70s counterculture and by North American Afrocentric and Kemetic movements, which saw in it a symbol of reconnection with Egyptian heritage. Today it appears widely in jewelry and as a tattoo motif, often loosely tied to general ideas of life, eternity, or spirituality - contemporary uses that go well beyond, and sometimes drift from, the precise meaning it held in Egyptian texts.
Pr-ankh, the "house of life": where the name Per-Ankh comes from
Our app's name does not come directly from the sign alone, but from a broader expression that contains it: pr-ˁnḫ, literally "the house of life" (per, "house," and ankh, "life"). In ancient Egypt, the Per-Ankh referred to a real institution, attested by inscriptions and papyri from sites such as Abydos, Coptos, and Amarna: a kind of scriptorium attached to temples, where scribes copied, composed, and preserved religious, medical, magical, and astronomical texts.
Egyptologists still debate exactly how broad these institutions' activities were - library, copying workshop, training ground for scribes and priests, or some combination depending on the period and site - but the core idea is not in dispute: the Per-Ankh was a place where written knowledge was produced, transmitted, and safeguarded, considered so valuable that it was literally bound up with the word "life."
Why this name and this symbol for our app
This double heritage explains why we named the app Per-Ankh. On one hand, the ankh as a symbol expresses the idea of giving a second life to a script that has been extinct for nearly two thousand years - bringing it back, sign by sign, in every person who learns to read it. On the other hand, the name Per-Ankh points directly to the role we want to play: to be, on our own modest scale, a contemporary house of life - a place where this ancient knowledge keeps being transmitted rather than resting only in museums and scholarly papers. The choice, then, is not decorative: it ties precisely what the sign meant to the Egyptians to what we are trying to do today.