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. Thomas Young proved that the oval contained a royal name, 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.
How was a name written in a cartouche?
Only some of a king’s names went inside one. A king had five names, and the British Museum’s 1909 guide explains that the fourth, his name as king of the South and the North, and the fifth, his personal name as a son of Ra, were the ones written in the oval; Flinders Petrie’s catalogue of amulets speaks of “the two cartouches of Ramessu II”. Inside, the name was spelled out in hieroglyphs. After a queen’s name came a pair of extra signs: Thomas Young noticed that they always followed the name of a goddess, queen or princess, and the guide explains that they were added to Cleopatra’s because she was regarded as a goddess. They were not part of the name itself.
Write in hieroglyphs
stringmash.comHieroglyphics translatorSpell a name in Egyptian hieroglyphs, letter by letter, and put it in a cartouche.Read next
- Next in Egyptian hieroglyphicsTyetThe tyet, called the girdle or buckle of Isis: an amulet meant to bring the protection of Isis to the dead.
- The same shape in Andean and Inca symbolsNazca spiderA spider about 46 metres long drawn on the desert floor of southern Peru, one of the animal figures of the Nazca lines.
See also
Shen ring, Eye of Horus, Scarab, Djed pillar, Was sceptre, Crook and flail.
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)
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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