Sbk — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Sbk, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Sbk to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is 𓃣, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Sbk.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: “SOH-bek” — already essentially the form used today The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form sobek 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: sobek 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.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Sobek absorbed and was absorbed: as Sobek-Ra he took solar status, while earlier he had fused with Horus as Sobek-Horus, lord of the Fayunite unity of king and river. The Greeks called his city Crocodilopolis and identified him with their own river-figures rather than a single Olympian; Roman-period Fayum mummy portraits from his cities remain among Egyptology’s most familiar images.
And it never stopped working. The name Sobek survives in the modern scholarly vocabulary of the Nile and appears throughout Egyptological literature as the archetype of Egyptian theriolatry — the worship of a dangerous animal not despite but because of its power. The Fayum’s temple of Medinet Madi preserves the longest surviving sacred hymn cycles addressed to a crocodile.
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.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Sbk is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form sobek is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Sbk stands at /sobek/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Papyrus Westcar (the wax crocodile episode), Herodotus, Histories 2.68–69 (the crocodile and Crocodilopolis), Strabo, Geography 17.1.38 (Petsuchos).
The Register Continues
Entry 493 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: Sleipnir (read it) · next entry: Skr (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.