akh
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology 1
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]akh (plural akhs)
- In Egyptian mythology, (roughly) a spirit of the dead that has successfully completed its transition to the afterlife.
- 1948, Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature, page 64:
- Their abode is heaven; and the Akh, by contrast with the Ba, does not retain any relation to the body.… It is a deceased, a transcendent being, without earthly or material ties; and, as such, it is the most spiritualized of the various concepts of the dead.
- 2000, James P. Allen, Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, page 33:
- After spending the night asleep in their tombs, the akhs would wake each morning at sunrise and “come forth from the necropolis” to enjoy an ideal life, free from the cares of physical existence.
- 2005, Gary A. Stillwell, Afterlife: Post-Mortem Judgments in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece, page 118:
- The akh would later become the state achieved when the ba and ka are rejoined.
- 2009, Janet Balk, “Egyptian Perceptions of Death in Antiquity”, in Clifton D. Bryant, Dennis L. Peck, editors, Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience, page 399:
- If a person’s ka and ba were not reunited and akh failed to develop, then everlasting life would not occur.
- 2015, “Afterlife”, in Eric Orlin, editor, Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, page 17:
- Different postmortem aspects of the individual are mentioned in ritual texts, so that it is unclear how they relate to one another: the ka (what leaves the body when death occurs), the ba (the personality of the individual), and the akh (a glorified bodily form).
Etymology 2
[edit]Borrowed from Arabic أَخ (ʔaḵ, “brother”). Doublet of ock.
Alternative forms
[edit]- akhi (with the pronominal suffix)
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]akh (plural akhs)
Anagrams
[edit]Old Swedish
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Drom Middle Low German ach (“an unhappy interjection”).
Interjection
[edit]akh
Descendants
[edit]- Swedish: ack
Categories:
- English terms borrowed from Egyptian
- English terms derived from Egyptian
- English 1-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- Rhymes:English/ɑːk
- Rhymes:English/ɑːk/1 syllable
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- English terms borrowed from Arabic
- English terms derived from Arabic
- English terms derived from the Arabic root ء خ و
- English doublets
- Rhymes:English/æk
- Rhymes:English/æk/1 syllable
- en:Islam
- Multicultural London English
- Multicultural Toronto English
- English slang
- en:Afterlife
- en:Egyptian mythology
- Old Swedish terms borrowed from Middle Low German
- Old Swedish terms derived from Middle Low German
- Old Swedish lemmas
- Old Swedish interjections