protective · from c. 2000 BCE
The Tyet
A looped knot cut in red jasper and laid at the throat of the dead, with a spell that puts the protection of Isis around the body.
What the sources claim for it
The protection of Isis, extended to a body that can no longer protect itself.
History
Where does the Tyet come from?
The tyet resembles an ankh with its arms folded down, and its name is written with the sign used for a knot or tie. Book of the Dead spell 156 directs that it be made of red jasper, moistened, and placed at the neck of the deceased, and states that the power of Isis will protect the body and that Horus will rejoice to see it.
The red material is not incidental — the object is called the blood of Isis in the spell's own framing — and the pairing with the djed at the spine gives the wrapped body two amulets covering two claims: stability from Osiris, active protection from Isis.
2 figures
Who is it attached to?
Figures who carry it
An attribute rather than a signature — held, worn or associated in the texts and the images.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
Little used outside Egyptology until modern Kemetic and pagan revival movements adopted it as an emblem of Isis specifically.
Which texts describe it?
Oldest first, with what each one does with the mark. A mark described in a Bronze Age incantation and a mark first drawn in a seventeenth-century manuscript are different kinds of claim, whatever the shape has in common.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Anonymous; tr. E. A. Wallis Budge · c. 1550 BCE onward · Egyptian
Spell 156 gives the material, the placement and the words.
Read The Egyptian Book of the Dead in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Hunefer · Wikimedia file page
Egyptian Amulets & Domestic Objects
Anonymous; recovered from settlements and burials · c. 2000 BCE onward · Material evidence
Found in red jasper, carnelian and red glass, overwhelmingly in burials.
Read Egyptian Amulets & Domestic Objects in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Roland Unger · Wikimedia file page
Nearby
Related marks
The Ankh
The sign for 'life', held to the nose of a king by a god. Not an amulet first — a hieroglyph that got carried into three dimensions.
The Djed Pillar
A four-tiered column meaning stability, later read as the backbone of Osiris and raised upright at festival as a resurrection.
The Was Sceptre
A straight staff with a forked foot and an animal head — and the animal, on the best reading, is Set's.
The Uraeus
A cobra rearing at the front of a crown, understood as the eye of the sun placed where it can spit at whatever approaches the wearer's face.
The Wedjat Eye
The eye Set tore out and Thoth made whole. Wedjat means 'the sound one' — the amulet is named for the repair, not the injury.
The Winged Disc
A sun with wings, borrowed by every empire in the region in turn — and the direct ancestor of the Persian faravahar.