In
Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a
royal
Royal may refer to:
People
* Royal (name), a list of people with either the surname or given name
* A member of a royal family
Places United States
* Royal, Arkansas, an unincorporated community
* Royal, Illinois, a village
* Royal, Iowa, a ...
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
Sneferu ( snfr-wj "He has perfected me", from ''Ḥr-nb-mꜣꜥt-snfr-wj'' "Horus, Lord of Maat, has perfected me", also read Snefru or Snofru), well known under his Hellenized name Soris ( grc-koi, Σῶρις by Manetho), was the founding phar ...
. 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 , and the cartouche was essentially an expanded
shen ring.
Demotic script reduced the cartouche to a pair of brackets and a vertical line.
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.
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
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
).
As a hieroglyph, a cartouche can represent the
Egyptian-language
The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherm ...
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".
V11The 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".
[Betrò, 1995, p. 195.] The word can also be spelled as "r" with "n", the
mouth over the
horizontal n.
V10 D21:N35
See also
*
Serekh, a predecessor to the cartouche
References
*Betrò, 1995. ''
Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt,'' Betrò, Maria Carmela, c. 1995, 1996-(English), Abbeville Press Publishers, New York, London, Paris (hardcover, )
External links
*
*
Ancient Egyptian Cartouche facts
{{Ancient Egyptian religion footer
3rd-millennium BC establishments in Egypt
Ornaments (architecture)
Ancient Egyptian symbols
Royal titles
Egyptian hieroglyphs: rope-fiber-baskets-bags
Egyptian hieroglyphs