The ancient Egyptian

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...

 Sky hieroglyph, (also translated as heaven in some texts, or iconography), is Gardiner

Gardiner's Sign List

Gardiner's Sign List is a list of common Egyptian hieroglyphs compiled by Sir Alan Gardiner. It is considered a standard reference in the study of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs....

 sign listed no. N1, within the Gardiner signs for sky, earth, and water.

The Sky hieroglyph is used like an Egyptian language

Egyptian language

Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...

 biliteral

Egyptian biliteral signs

Biliteral Egyptian hieroglyphs are symbols which represent a specific sequence of two consonants, also two vowels, or combinational of both, in the language...

-(but is not listed there) and an ideogram

Ideogram

An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...

 in pt, "sky"; it is a determinative

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 may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and...

 in other synonyms of sky. For the language value hrt, it has the phonetic value hry.

Pt, with Gods and the Pharaoh

The Sky hieroglyph can be found in iconography

Iconography

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...

 with the gods, especially Ra

Ra

Ra is the ancient Egyptian sun god. By the Fifth Dynasty he had become a major deity in ancient Egyptian religion, identified primarily with the mid-day sun...

 as referencing the Lord of P(e)t, (Lord of Heaven), and the God's ownership of Pet. The Pharaoh is often equally named as the Lord of Pet.

Some ancient Egyptian names using the sky hieroglyph are Petosiris

Petosiris

Petosiris, called Ankhefenkhons, was the high priest of Thoth at Hermopolis and held various priestly degrees in the service of Sakhmet, Khnum, Amen-Re and Hathor. The son of Sishu and Nefer-renpet, he lived in the second half of the 4th century BCE under Persian rule...

 and the god Petbe

Petbe

In Egyptian mythology, Petbe was the god of revenge, worshiped in the area around Akhmin, in central Egypt. His name translates as Sky-Ba, roughly meaning Soul of the Sky, or Mood of the sky. However, Petbe may be a Chaldean deity introduced by immigrant workers from the Levant, with his name being...

.

Ligatured variants of Sky

The simple 'vault' of the sky hieroglyph has three variants that are ligatured with it.

Why the sky hieroglyph is not a biliteral

Though the sky hieroglyph is used as pt, in the Coptic alphabet

Coptic alphabet

The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language...

, for the Coptic language

Coptic language

Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...

, (the follow-on to the Egyptian hieroglyphs), the spelling of the "sky" is "pe" in Coptic. Consequently, Budge's 2-volume dictionary lists the sky hieroglyph under "pe-t"