N21

Meanings

Representing a tongue of land or perhaps a standard cultivated parcel (surveyed parcels for farming were usually shaped like elongated trapezoids, with the long sides parallel to the Nile). Compare the Chinese character 田. This glyph originally developed as a variant of the earlier N22 (). In the 8th Dynasty N36 () came to be used instead as the determinative for cultivated land, and in the 11th Dynasty this developed into N23 (), but in the 18th Dynasty N21 became more widely used and took their place as the ordinary determinative for this purpose.