Photographing things I didn't understand yet
I went looking for circles at the British Museum a few weeks ago, mostly out of curiosity and somehow ended up photographing hieroglyphs without really knowing what I was looking at. It was only afterwards, reading into it properly that I found the symbol that's stayed with me since.
The shen ring
It's called the shen ring – a loop of rope, knotted, both ends still visible even though the whole thing reads as unbroken. The Egyptians used it to mean encirclement and eternal protection and when you stretch it out into an oval it becomes something more familiar – the cartouche, the shape that surrounds a pharaoh's name on temple walls and sarcophagi. Some of the earliest examples are almost 4700 years old.
Tied, not unbroken
What I keep coming back to isn't the eternity part, although that would be the obvious reading. It's the detail that the rope's two ends are still there if you look closely, tied together rather than fused into one continuous line. The circle isn't a circle because it has no beginning or end, it's a circle because something was deliberately looped and closed. There's a difference, I think – between a shape that simply never started and a shape that someone made whole on purpose.
I don't think I went looking for a symbol that matched what this brand is about. I think I just kept noticing circles everywhere once I started paying attention. This was the oldest, strangest version I'd come across. A loop, tied rather than unbroken, standing for protection that lasts.
