Why is one of the Egyptian hieroglyphs a placenta?
Did they have a use for placentas, such as making magical balms or something?
Other cultures, like Celtic with Runes, used really common objects as the names of letters.
I think Celtic societies were more associated with Ogham, and that Runes are associated with Teutonic societies.
But as for Egyptian, unlike Ogham or Runes, which were limited in number, Egyptian was a lot like modern Japanese, where you have some phonetic components and some logographic components. There were (or are?) hundreds or thousands of hieroglyphs, one which just happened to be a placenta. I’m not sure what the Egyptian word for placenta was, but if it was short or easy to to convey with a simple picture, a placenta could make as much sense as any other object.
A placenta may not be an everyday thing to most people, but it does hold reverence with many cultures as the original cradle of life.
Do you have a link to the character you’re thinking of? There is a uniliteral (phonetic) character that sort of looks, I think, like a placenta, but isn’t.
Excuse my density, but for the life of me, I can’t visualize what a placenta looks like. Does it have a distinctive shape that is instantly recognizable to everyone but me? I never thought about it before, but upon reflection, all I come up with is an amorphous blob of bloody tissue connected to an umbilical vord. Please point me at a picture of the international symbol for “placenta”, the better to stamp out my ignorance.
Egyptian hieroglyphic for the sound “kh”, whose symbol is a stylized placenta.
Fascinating home page of same.
How do they know it’s a placenta? Duck Duck Goose’s link is pretty much just a circle. How do they know it’s not supposed to be a cookie?
My book “Middle Egyptian” by James Allen (which seems like a pretty darn reputable book) says that the third h (the kh sound and symbol that you refer to) is an “unknown object”.
Who started the placenta thing?
In How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs by Mark Collier and Bill Manley, they refer to the symbol as
I have gone through all my other books on Egyptian history and they all refer to it as either an ‘unknown’ or a ‘placenta’.
As to why, I am not really sure, nor do I have any idea at the moment when it started.
Like Laurange, I’ve always seen that labelled as an “unidentified object”, and never, before now, as a placenta. Does it even look like a placenta?
Incidentally, the character I was thinking of in my previous post can be seen on this page, right after the inexplicably labelled, and controversial, “placenta”. It is most certainly not identified as a placenta, but it is an organ of sorts, and I thought it might be confused with a placenta.
In retrospect that was a bit silly, since I haven’t the slightest idea what a placenta, in the flesh, looks like. [sub]But I imagine it looks sort of like this hieroglyph.[/sub]
That thing looks like the old “Death Star” AT&T logo to me.
Now it’s all coming together!!! That’s why they were called Baby Bells!
A placenta looks like a sack with an umbilical cord coming out of it.
This link will get you there a bit quicker:
http://www.greatscott.com/hiero/hierf1b.html
Not that I’ve seen a placenta in person - but neither the one labeled as such or the one below it “animal’s belly” look like what I would think of…
BTW- did anyone else see the door lock hieroglyph and think “Dilbert glasses”? 
Well, I sure didn’t ask for it. Blechhh.
But DDG’s link looks less like a placenta than a ball of string. I think the placenta connection is a stretch, unless someone can back it up.
Hey, bucko, it’s the circle of life. If you think it looks bad lyin’ there, imagine it comin’ out of ya.
This thread’s bonus factoid: my name in heiroglyphs is: mat hand slope-of-a-hill water.
Well, what can I say? I always figured a placenta was sort of an amorphous tussue blob. Turns out I was right.
The “animal belly”, though, that was really off the cuff. I don’t know what I was thinking.
I think the answer to the original question is that the placenta may not be very “everyday”, but it’s sound is probably not available in other words.
This is why so many children’s abecediaries have Queen and Xylophone in with the Apples, Bananas, and Cats. The rare sounds have few choices to demonstrate them.
The Egyptians needed a few “letters” to spell names and foreign words. You might never need a placenta in a tomb diarama of a warrior’s career, but you might need one in his cartouch if his name had that sound.