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The Egyptian word 'ankh' (ꜥnḫ in the conventional Egyptological transliteration) meant 'life,' 'to live,' and 'living,' functioning as noun, verb, and adjective in the Egyptian language. The hieroglyph for the word was the famous looped cross — a tau cross with an oval or teardrop-shaped loop at the top — which appears throughout Egyptian monumental art from at least the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3100 BCE). The origin of the ankh's form is among the most debated questions in Egyptology, with no consensus reached. Proposed explanations include: a stylized sandal strap (the loop representing the strap passing over the foot, the cross representing the sole); a knotted cloth bundle; a mirror; a sexual union of male and female principles; and a stylized version of the hieroglyph for the Nile's annual inundation cycle. The sandal-strap theory was long favored because the Egyptian word for 'sandal strap' is also 'ankh,' but whether the life symbol was named for the sandal strap or the sandal strap named for the life symbol remains unresolved.

The ankh was not merely a sign for the abstract concept of life; it was understood as a physical vehicle of life-force — a thing that could be carried, offered, and transmitted from one being to another. In Egyptian monumental art, gods are routinely depicted holding the ankh by its loop, often raising it to the nostrils of the pharaoh in a gesture of bestowing breath, the most immediate form of life. The hieroglyph 'nḥm' (breath, throat) and the ankh were closely associated in this living-breath theology: to give the ankh was to give the breath of life. The gods who personified creation and life — Osiris, Isis, Hathor, Ra — are shown with the ankh; it appears in compound words like 'ankh-netjer' (life of the god) and in royal names: Tutankhamun (ruled c. 1332–1323 BCE) has 'ankh' at the center of his name, meaning 'the living image of Amun.'

The ankh underwent remarkable transformations as Egypt's religious landscape changed. When the pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1353–1336 BCE) instituted his monotheistic revolution focused on the solar disk Aten, the ankh was retained but repurposed: the rays of the Aten disk in Amarna art terminate not in human hands but in small ankh symbols, suggesting that the solar energy itself is the life-force, radiating life to all it touches. When Christianity became the dominant religion of Roman Egypt in the fourth century CE, the Egyptian Christian (Coptic) community adopted the ankh as the earliest form of the Coptic cross — the 'crux ansata' (handled cross) or 'key of life' — assimilating the ancient Egyptian life-symbol to the Christian cross, in a continuity that made the transition of religious symbols visible and deliberate. The Coptic ankh, also called the 'key of the Nile' from its association with the life-giving annual Nile flood, is still used in Coptic Christianity today.

The modern life of the ankh begins in the nineteenth century with the systematic excavation of Egyptian antiquities, which brought thousands of ankh objects — jewelry, amulets, bronze mirrors, carved reliefs — into European and American museum collections, making the symbol visually familiar to a broad public for the first time in over a millennium. Its revival as a living cultural symbol accelerated dramatically through the twentieth century: the ankh became a symbol of African heritage and identity in Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a New Age symbol of esoteric spirituality associated with Theosophy and Western occultism, and a widely worn piece of jewelry across multiple subcultures including Goth, heavy metal, and alternative communities. The symbol's robustness — its ability to maintain recognizable meaning across five thousand years and through Egyptian religion, Coptic Christianity, Islamic Egypt, European antiquarianism, and contemporary global popular culture — is testimony to the power of a well-designed visual sign. The ankh is perhaps the oldest symbol in continuous cultural use that is still immediately recognized and still understood to mean what it has always meant: life.