Cartouche
The oval ring drawn around a royal name in hieroglyphs. As an amulet, Petrie wrote, it was meant to preserve the name.
Meaning
Kings’ names were written inside it, and later rulers of Egypt kept the custom: the Ptolemies and the Romans had their names transcribed into hieroglyphs and cut in cartouches like the pharaohs. The amulet of the cartouche has been taken for a shen drawn out long, Budge notes, though he thought it more probably stood simply for a name.
The key to reading hieroglyphs
The cartouche opened the script to modern readers. Scholars suspected that the oval contained a royal name; Thomas Young proved it, and read the name of Ptolemy on the Rosetta Stone. In 1822 Jean-François Champollion corrected and greatly enlarged Young’s list of alphabetic signs, reading the names and titles of most of the Roman emperors.
See also
Shen ring, Eye of Horus, Scarab, Djed pillar, Was sceptre, Shen ring.
Sources
- Amulets, illustrated by the Egyptian collection in University College, London, W. M. Flinders Petrie, 1914, Constable and Company, London (Internet Archive), No. 78
- Egyptian Magic, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1901, Internet Archive (Getty Research Institute copy), Amulet 18
- A guide to the Egyptian collections in the British Museum, British Museum, 1909 (introduction by E. A. Wallis Budge), Harrison and Sons, London (Project Gutenberg), Chapter on Egyptian writing
- The Rosetta Stone, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1913, British Museum (Project Gutenberg)
Last reviewed September 25, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research