upalt=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">KV17.html" ;"title="Seti I, from KV17">Seti I, from KV17 at the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Neues Museum, Berlin In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche ( ) is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a pharaoh, 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 Sneferu or Soris (c. 2600 BC) was an ancient Egyptian monarch and the first pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt, during the earlier half of the Old Kingdom period (26th century BC). He introduced major innovations in the design and constructio ...

. 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 Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...

word for cartouche was (compare with Coptic ''šne'' yielding eventual sound changes), and the cartouche was essentially an expanded

shen ring In ancient Egypt, a shen ring was a circle with a line tangent to it, represented in hieroglyphs as a stylised loop of a rope, bound to a stick. The tool used by builders and architects. Shen rings can most often be seen in the clutches of Horu ...

Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm Chữ Nôm (, ) is a logographic writing system formerly used t ...

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 A regnal name, regnant name, or reign name is the name used by monarchs and popes during their reigns and subsequently, historically. Since ancient times, some monarchs have chosen to use a different name from their original name when they accede ...

), and the "Son of Ra" titulary (the so-called '' nomen'' name given at birth), which were enclosed by a cartouche. At times

amulet An amulet, also known as a good luck charm or phylactery, is an object believed to confer protection upon its possessor. The word "amulet" comes from the Latin word , which Pliny's ''Natural History'' describes as "an object that protects a perso ...

s 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). Compare: 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 A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they ...

for actions and nouns dealing with items: "to divide", "to exclude". V11

The cartouche hieroglyph is used as a

for Egyptian language ''šn''-(sh)n, for "circuit", or "ring"-(like the

or the cartouche). Later it was used for ''rn'', the word "name". The word can also be spelled as "r" with "n", the

mouth A mouth also referred to as the oral is the body orifice through which many animals ingest food and animal communication#Auditory, vocalize. The body cavity immediately behind the mouth opening, known as the oral cavity (or in Latin), is also t ...

over the horizontal n. V10 D21:N35

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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

See also

References

External links