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Osiris's name in hieroglyphs: the throne and the eye

22 October 2026

Osiris's name in hieroglyphs is two signs: a seat or throne and a human eye. Egyptologists transliterate it wsjr and say it "Wesir". A small seated god often follows as a silent sign that the word names a god.

Osiris is the Greek form of the name. He was the king of the dead, and his name fills coffins, tomb walls and the stelae left by pilgrims at Abydos.

A throne above an eye spells the god

The seat Q1 is a high-backed chair seen from the side. Elsewhere it writes st, "place", and it begins the name of Isis, his wife. The eye D4 writes jr, a sound shared with the verb "to do, to make". In the usual spelling the seat sits above the eye or just before it, and the seated god A40 closes the word.

Scribes also put the eye first, and the order shifts from one text to the next. In the Greco-Roman period a longer spelling adds the cloth on a pole R8, the sign for nṯr, "god".

Seat Eye Seated god Cloth on a pole

Egyptologists still dispute the first sign

The seat normally reads st, yet the Greek and Coptic forms begin with a w sound. Adolf Erman settled on wsjr, the reading most books use. Kurt Sethe took the signs at face value in 1930 as st-jrt, "seat of the eye", and J. Gwyn Griffiths rejected that on grounds of sound. Griffiths derived the name from wsr, "mighty".

Kenji Muchiki proposed ꜣsjr in 1990. James P. Allen reads jsjrj and explains it as "engendering principle". Mark Smith argued in 2017 that the second sign stands for the verb jrj, "to make", and left the meaning open.

His titles follow the name in fixed phrases

Osiris is rarely named alone. Texts add titles that a reader soon learns to spot as groups of signs:

wnn-nfr, Wennefer: the hare E34, two water signs N35 and the heart and windpipe F35, "one who is continually good"
ḫnty-jmntjw, Khentiamentiu: the water jars W17 and the western standard R14, "foremost of the westerners", the dead
nb ꜣbḏw: the basket V30 for nb, "lord of Abydos"
nṯr ꜥꜣ: the god sign R8 and the column O29, "great god"

Hare Ripple of water Heart and windpipe Water jars in a rack Feather on a standard Basket Wooden column

Read the offering formula that names him

Khentiamentiu began as an older god of Abydos

Khentiamentiu was first a separate god of the Abydos cemetery, shown as a jackal. First Dynasty seals from Abydos already carry the name. During the late Old Kingdom the title passed to Osiris, and from the First Intermediate Period the old temple of Khentiamentiu at Abydos belonged to Osiris. His other great town was Djedu, Busiris in the Delta.

Every dead person could become an Osiris

In the myth Seth killed his brother Osiris and cut up the body. Isis gathered the pieces and revived him long enough to conceive Horus, who avenged his father. Osiris stayed below as ruler and judge of the dead.

At first only the dead king joined him, in the Pyramid Texts carved from the reign of Unas at the end of the Fifth Dynasty on. Middle Kingdom coffins opened that fate to officials and their families. On them and on later coffins the god's name stands in front of the owner's, as "the Osiris N", and from the Coffin Texts on scribes sometimes wrote "the Osiris of N".

Osiris holds the crook S38 and the flail S45, the sceptres of kings. The crook is thought to show him as a shepherd, and the meaning of the flail is uncertain. The djed pillar R11 was read as his backbone.

Crook Flail Djed pillar

Read about the djed pillar

Abydos was the holy city of Osiris

Later Egyptians took one of the First Dynasty royal tombs at Abydos for the grave of Osiris. A festival there acted out his death and return. The stela of Ikhernofret, an official of Senusret III in the Twelfth Dynasty, records how he arranged it. Pilgrims set up their own stelae nearby to share in it, and their prayers name Osiris with the seat and the eye.

Seti I built his temple at Abydos with seven chapels side by side, one of them for Osiris, and a suite of Osiris halls behind them. Behind the temple lies the Osireion, the king's sunken symbolic tomb, built to share the burial of the god.

Signs to look for at Abydos

Late temples gave Osiris rooms on their roofs

On the roof of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera stand six small chapels of Osiris. One holds a long text on the Mysteries of Osiris in the month of Khoiak. It tells how figures of the god were shaped in gold moulds filled with barley and sand, watered daily and buried at the end of the month. A copy of the round Dendera zodiac sits in another of the chapels. The original is in the Louvre.

At Philae a staircase leads up to Osirian chambers on the roof of the Temple of Isis. Her statue sailed from Philae to the nearby island of Bigeh, where the Egyptians placed one of the tombs of Osiris. On the first pylon the king stands before Wennefer and Isis. On Philae's walls the names of Isis and Osiris can stand in cartouches, like those of kings.

Signs to look for at Philae

Questions

How do you write Osiris in hieroglyphs?

Draw a high-backed chair, then an almond-shaped eye under it or after it. Add a small seated figure with a beard to mark a god.

How was Osiris's name pronounced?

The script wrote no vowels, so "Wesir" is a modern convention. Coptic, the last stage of Egyptian, wrote vowels and spelled the name ousire. Greek writers turned it into Osiris.

Why does the name of Osiris start with the same sign as Isis?

The seat Q1 begins both. Isis writes it with the loaf, the egg and a seated woman. Kurt Sethe thought she began as the throne in person, a view Jürgen Osing and Klaus Kuhlmann reject.

Why is Osiris shown with green skin?

Green was the colour of rebirth, and black, his other colour, stood for the fertile soil of the Nile valley. He is drawn wrapped like a mummy from the chest down. He wears the atef, a tall white crown with an ostrich feather at each side.

Glossary

coffin: A box for the body, of wood or stone, often shaped like a person and painted with spells, names and gods. Rich burials nested several coffins inside a sarcophagus.
Coptic: The last stage of the Egyptian language, written in Greek letters with a few extra letters taken from demotic. The Coptic Church still uses it, and it showed scholars how Egyptian words sounded.
dynasty: A line of kings counted together, usually one family. Egyptologists number Egypt's kings in about 30 dynasties, following the priest Manetho.
First Intermediate Period: The years after the Old Kingdom, about 2160 to 2055 BC, when Egypt split between rival kings in Herakleopolis in the north and Thebes in the south.
hieroglyphs: The picture signs of ancient Egyptian writing, used from about 3200 BC to AD 394. A sign can stand for sounds, for a whole word, or for the kind of thing a word means.
Old Kingdom: The age of the pyramid builders, about 2686 to 2181 BC, from the 3rd to the 6th Dynasty.
Pyramid Texts: The oldest religious spells of Egypt, carved in the burial rooms of pyramids from the reign of Unas, around 2350 BC, on.
scribe: A person trained to read and write, who kept accounts, wrote letters and copied texts. Few Egyptians could write, and scribes were well respected.
stela: An upright stone slab carved with words and pictures, set up in tombs and temples or to mark a border.
temple: The house of a god, where priests served the god's statue. Temples for dead kings kept up their offerings after death.
tomb: A burial place: a pit, a mastaba, a pyramid or rooms cut into rock. Its chapel was where the family brought offerings.
transliteration: Writing Egyptian in Latin letters, one letter for each sound sign, such as ꜥnḫ for ankh. Egyptologists say the words with an e between consonants.