r-jb

Egyptian

Etymology

r (“mouth, opening, passage”) +‎ jb (“heart”) in a direct genitive construction, thus literally ‘the mouth of the heart’, or perhaps less literally ‘the passage of the interior’, with jb used as it is in ḥr jb (“in the midst of”).

Pronunciation

• (modern Egyptological) IPA^(key): /ɛr ib/
  • Conventional anglicization: er-ib

Noun

 m

1. (chiefly medicine) the digestive tract, seen as also connected with other organs and capable of influencing them medically

Usage notes

Traditionally translated as stomach, but this view has been shifted in recent years with a more nuanced understanding of Egyptian medical concepts.

Inflection

Declension of r-jb (masculine)

singular	r-jb
dual	rwj-jb
plural	rw-jb

Hyponyms

• mnḏr

References

• James P[eter] Allen (2010) Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 184.
• Jonny Russell et al. (2021) “An investigation of the pharmacological applications used for the Ancient Egyptian systemic model ‘ra-ib’ compared with modern Traditional Chinese Medicine” in Journal of Ethnopharmacology, volume 265, article 113115, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2020.113115