Wedjat, the Eye of Horus
wḏꜣtWhat it actually depicts
A human eye with a brow, combined with the markings of a falcon's face: the drop below and the curling line to the side are a lanner falcon's cheek pattern.
What it meant
Wholeness. The name means 'the sound one' or 'the one made whole', from the eye Set tore out and Thoth restored.
Where you see it
Amulets in enormous numbers. Painted on the side of coffins so the dead could look out. On the prow of boats.
What gets said that is wrong
Two things. It is not the Eye of Providence in a triangle, which is an eighteenth-century European emblem with no Egyptian connection whatsoever. And the widely repeated claim that its parts are fractions used by scribes for measuring grain, halves down to one sixty-fourth, is a 1911 hypothesis that later work on the actual hieratic signs has undermined; it is repeated everywhere as fact and should not be.
Carried by
Other symbols