Per (hieroglyph)

Pr is the hieroglyph for 'house', the floor-plan of a walled building with an open doorway. While its original pronunciation is not known with certainty, modern Egyptology assigns it the value of per, but purely on the basis of a convention specific to the discipline. However, the Ancient Greek rendering of the title pr-`3 as Ancient Greek: φαραώ pharaō suggests the reconstruction of the historical (Late Egyptian) pronunciation as *par, see Pharaoh#History of the Pharaoh title.

Pr combined with an associated "personal name", god, or location becomes the "House of .... ." An example for pharaoh Setnakhte is the city of: Pr-Atum, (city of Pithom). Pr and Ankh-(Life) is a "combination hieroglyph" and is the "word" for House of Life. The House of Life is a library for papyrus books-(scrolls), as well as a possible scriptorium.

The shape of Pr in beginning dynasties had variations in the shape of a square, with the opening. See Garrett Reference for tomb of Official Ti.

Pr is one of the roughly 22 hieroglyphs which were borrowed into Proto-Sinaitic script, the earliest known alphabetic writing system. It was used to represent the phoneme /b/ as in bayt, the Canaanite word for "house", after the hieroglyph's original meaning. The Latin letter B is a distant descendent of this letter.

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