The canonical register: Gb
Evidence dossier 185 — Gb. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Gb
- Original script: 𓅬
- Pantheon: Egyptian
- Convention: Egyptological transliteration — ꜣ, ꜥ, ḥ, ḏ, ṯ as the grammars record them
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 185 of 597
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is 𓅬, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Gb.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form geb is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.
What the fallback status forbids is promotion: geb may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Geb appears wherever the earth needs a face: relief programmes at Kom Ombo and Esna show him green-skinned with the goose; the second hypostyle of Karnak’s Khonsu temple and the Barque shrine of Luxor preserve fine Green-God imagery. His goose emblem anchors the corners of temple floor-plans as the four corners of the earth.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Geb is less famous than his children but structurally indispensable: every genealogy of the Egyptian gods runs through him. His laughter-as-earthquake remains one of the most charming etiological fragments of Egyptian religion, quoted in every handbook; and his goose still cackles on temple walls at Kom Ombo and Esna.
The Convention's Own History
Egyptological transliteration exists because hieroglyphs write consonants, not vowels. The characters ꜣ (aleph) and ꜥ (ayin) are consonants — a glottal reed and a pharyngeal grip — and rendering them as vowels does not "simplify" the name, it deletes consonants from it. The conventions in use descend from nineteenth-century decipherment and the standardized Manuel de Codage: ḥ, ḫ, ḏ, ṯ each mark a distinct consonant the Egyptian wrote and a modern reader must not merge. When this register defends them, it defends the principle that a writing system older than the alphabet gets to keep its consonants.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Gb: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form geb rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /geb/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Pyramid Texts (Geb as father and throne-estate), Contendings of Horus and Seth (New Kingdom narrative), Book of the Dead, spell 125 (confession to the earth).
The Register Continues
Entry 185 of 597 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Gē (read it) · next entry: Gefjun (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.