From Hieroglyphs to Unicode: The Journey of Bꜣstt
Long before it was a domain, the name traveled through scripts. The name is preserved in Hieroglyphs as 𓎯𓏏𓏏𓁐 — Egyptian hieroglyphic, attested Old Kingdom – Late Antiquity, c. 2600 BCE – 400 CE, in Egypt. The script is written right-to-left / top-to-bottom. The scholarly transliteration is Bꜣstt (Egyptological conventional), giving the normalized reading Original vocalisation unknown; Egyptological /ˈbæstɛt/.. The rendering proceeds step by step: - The Egyptian name is written 𓎯𓏏𓏏𓁐 in hieroglyphs. - Hieroglyphs combine logograms, phonograms, and determinatives; the exact function of each sign depends on context. - Egyptian writing does not record vowels; the vocalised form is a modern convention reconstructed from Coptic and Greek evidence. - The Unicode restoration Bꜣstt uses Egyptological alef/ayin and... This post follows Bꜣstt from its earliest attestation to the address bar.
The Original Sign
The original script gives us 𓎯𓏏𓏏𓁐. The name is preserved in Hieroglyphs as 𓎯𓏏𓏏𓁐 — Egyptian hieroglyphic, attested Old Kingdom – Late Antiquity, c. 2600 BCE – 400 CE, in Egypt. The script is written right-to-left / top-to-bottom. The scholarly transliteration is Bꜣstt (Egyptological conventional), giving the normalized reading Original vocalisation unknown; Egyptological /ˈbæstɛt/.. The rendering proceeds step by step: - The Egyptian name is written 𓎯𓏏𓏏𓁐 in hieroglyphs. - Hieroglyphs combine logograms, phonograms, and determinatives; the exact function of each sign depends on context. - Egyptian writing does not record vowels; the vocalised form is a modern convention reconstructed from Coptic and Greek evidence. - The Unicode restoration Bꜣstt uses Egyptological alef/ayin and...
The Scholarly Transliteration
The name is attested in Hieroglyphs as 𓎯𓏏𓏏𓁐. Etymologically it means "She of the ointment jar (Egyptian bꜣstt)". The ASCII form bastet survives only because the early domain-name system could not carry diacritics; it is a technological compromise, not an ancient spelling. The Unicode restoration Bꜣstt recovers the full diacritic detail of the scholarly transliteration directly in the address bar. The original preserves one prosodic feature — stress or vowel length — rather than both, which places the name in Tier 2. The letter-by-letter transformation runs: - b → B — Same - a → ꜣ — Alef: glottal stop - s → s — Same - t → t — Same - e → — — Dropped: vowel not written - t → t — Same The project holds the domain bꜣstt.com (xn--bstt-ge8o.com) as the... Scholars settled on Bꜣstt as the registrable restoration: faithful enough to be recognizable, precise enough to carry the marks that matter.
DNS as a Time Machine
Punycode lets the DNS carry non-ASCII characters without breaking older routers. To the user, the address bar shows Bꜣstt; to the infrastructure, it is an encoded xn-- string. The duality is invisible, but the result is revolutionary: a pre-digital name living inside a post-digital system.
Pronunciation
Scholars reconstruct the sound as 'boo-ISS-tee' — say 'boo', then a tiny catch before 'iss', ending with 'tee' (the final t is often silent).. Hearing the name in your own voice is one way to make the restoration personal.
Why This Restoration Matters
Restoring Bꜣstt is part of a larger effort to make the web multilingual by default. The PÚNYCODEX project does not ask users to learn a new alphabet; it asks the infrastructure to respect the alphabets that already exist. A single Unicode domain is a small proof, but it is a proof that scales: every name restored makes the next one easier.
Related Names
Further Reading
The Name in Context
Bꜣstt (bastet) — Home, Fertility, Cats · She of the ointment jar (Egyptian bꜣstt) — belongs to the Egyptian tradition, where it is catalogued under the domain "Home, Fertility, Cats". The name means "She of the ointment jar (Egyptian bꜣstt)". Bꜣstt begins as a lioness and ends as a cat. In the Old Kingdom she is a fierce daughter of Re, one of the raging eyes of the sun; by the Late Period she has become the benevolent lady of the home, her round face and upright ears copied by millions of household cats. The transformation is not a decline but an expansion: she learns to keep watch at the cradle as well as at the battlefield. Her name may mean 'she of the ointment jar' (bꜣstt), linking her to perfumes, cosmetics, and the guarded substances of the...