Famous ancient Egyptian symbols
The ankh โฅ means life and is held by gods in temple art; see the ankh symbol page for its full story. The Eye of Horus ๐, or wedjat, is a symbol of protection and healing and was a popular amulet. The scarab beetle ๐ฃ stood for the sun god Khepri, who was imagined rolling the sun across the sky the way a dung beetle rolls its ball.
The djed pillar ๐ฝ means stability and is linked to Osiris, the was sceptre ๐ means power, and the falcon ๐ is the god Horus. The sun disk ๐ณ stands for the sun god Ra. For other eye signs, see the eye symbol page.
How hieroglyphs work
Hieroglyphs are not simply pictures of words. Most signs stand for sounds, some for whole words, and others are silent hints at meaning, called determinatives. Egyptians wrote them left to right, right to left or in columns; you read toward the faces of the people and animals.
Nobody could read them for centuries until Jean-Franรงois Champollion deciphered them in 1822 with help from the Rosetta Stone. Egyptologists sort the signs with Alan Gardiner's sign list, which is also how Unicode names them: ๐ is A001, a seated man.
Copying hieroglyphs and fixing empty boxes
Unicode added Egyptian hieroglyphs in 2009, so you can copy and paste them like any other text. Many current computers and phones include a font for them, but older devices and some apps do not, so a hieroglyph can show as an empty box even though the copied character is correct.
If you see boxes, install the free Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs font, or paste into an app that supports it. The ankh โฅ is an exception: it lives in the Miscellaneous Symbols block and works almost everywhere. You can look up any sign's code with the Unicode lookup tool.