Cartouche

A stone face carved with coloured hieroglyphics. Two cartouches - ovoid shapes with hieroglyphics inside - are visible at the bottom.

Birth and throne cartouches of Pharaoh Seti I, from KV17 at the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Neues Museum, Berlin.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell) is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. The first examples of the cartouche are associated with pharaohs at the end of the Third Dynasty, but the feature did not come into common use until the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu. While the cartouche is usually vertical with a horizontal line, if it makes the name fit better it can be horizontal, with a vertical line at the end (in the direction of reading). The ancient Egyptian word for cartouche was (compare with Coptic Template:Wikt-lang šne yielding eventual sound changes), and the cartouche was essentially an expanded shen ring. Demotic script reduced the cartouche to a pair of brackets and a vertical line.

A stone face carved with coloured hieroglyphics. Two cartouches - ovoid shapes with hieroglyphics inside - are visible at the bottom.

Birth and throne cartouches of Pharaoh Rameses II, from the temple of Ramesses II at Abydos in Egypt.

Of the five royal titularies it was the prenomen (the throne name), and the "Son of Ra" titulary (the so-called nomen name given at birth), which were enclosed by a cartouche.

At times amulets took the form of a cartouche displaying the name of a king and placed in tombs. Archaeologists often find such items important for dating a tomb and its contents. Cartouches were formerly only worn by pharaohs. The oval surrounding their name was meant to protect them from evil spirits in life and after death. The cartouche has become a symbol representing good luck and protection from evil.Template:Qn

The term "cartouche" was first applied by French soldiers who fancied that the symbol they saw so frequently repeated on the pharaonic ruins they encountered resembled a muzzle-loading firearm's paper powder cartridge ( in French).Template:Qn

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Cartouche in hieroglyphs
Template:Hiero/era | Era: Template:Hiero/era

As a hieroglyph, a cartouche can represent the Egyptian-language word for "name". It is listed as no. V10 in Gardiner's Sign List.

The cartouche in half-section, Gardiner no. V11 (as seen below) has a separate meaning in the Egyptian language as a determinative for actions and nouns dealing with items: "to divide", "to exclude". <hiero>V11</hiero>

The cartouche hieroglyph is used as a determinative for Egyptian language šn-(sh)n, for "circuit", or "ring"-(like the shen ring or the cartouche). Later it was used for rn, the word "name". The word can also be spelled as "r" with "n", the mouth over the horizontal n. <hiero>V10</hiero> <hiero>D21:N35</hiero>

See also

• Serekh, a predecessor to the cartouche

• Toki Pona, a modern constructed language using cartouches to write proper names

External links

• Template:Merriam-Webster
• Ancient Egyptian Cartouche facts
• The Ancient Egyptian Cartouche