Khufu

I forget now what I was looking at when incongruently I was shown this hieroglyphic.

The birds look like ibis or heron to me. Some kind of crane. The circle has a smudge in the center. The two birds could be identically poorly drawn, the scribble in the middle looks like "water." 

All of that is wrong. 

 Egret

 Ibis

Quail chick, this is what they actually are. The sound for "w" and sometimes "u." 

The hieroglyphs are painted red, they are circled in a cartouche. So what pharaoh's name is "___ w  ___ w" or "___ u ___u"?  

Turns out, the circle with a smudge is not "Re" or "Ra" as you can expect in a royal name, rather, it is that very odd sign that is not even classified, and guessed as "placenta." How they get placenta is beyond me. I never did like that answer. I have no idea how placenta is arrived at. But neither do they. The sign is not listed under "human parts of the body" instead it is classified under Aa for "unclassified." So, that is admission of not being sure. Let's call it a sieve instead. To me, the sign means "sieve" and not placenta. That's gross.

Phonetic designation, "ḫ" That's where you work up moisture at the bottom of your throat and make a gargling "kh" sound such as you hear in Hebrew, Arabic, and German. 

The scribbly bit in the middle is not water.

Water, an "n" sound.

Nor is it a stick "ḫt," a kht sound.

"F," sound,  honed viper, sign for "father" 

The cartouche is part of graffiti considered a hoax, due in part to its mistaken hieroglyphics but also because of monkeyshines by German anthropologists removing the portion, and did so at the point that they needed more funding. There are a lot of theories about what happened. So much hinges on proof that the pyramid was built at the time and for the person of Khufu. 

This is what they are trying to draw.

The bird is different from all the others because its little beak is a mere thumbtack on the front of its head. It's head and beak are not drawn as the rest of the birds. It is different too in the parallelism is greater in the legs. Most but not all other bird's legs are spread. The owl's legs are parallel also but its face is oddly straight on. The owl = "m" sound, among other things, and this chick ="w" sound and often "u" sound, so, both very common birds. Nobody painted them as hieratic scribbles that early. Hieratic writing came much later after Khufu as scribes really couldn't take all the serious bird differentation anymore and began scribbling a sort of shorthanded cursive.

When you see the name printed clearly like this there is no mistaking Khufu. It jumps right out at you. The simplicity of it with two quail chicks gives it away, and the circle that is not the sun sign confirms the name Khufu.