Cartouche

For other uses, see Cartouche (disambiguation).

Ancient Egyptian cartouche of Thutmose III, Karnak, Egypt.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oval with a horizontal line erected at one end, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name, coming into use during the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu. While the cartouche is usually vertical with a horizontal line, it is sometimes horizontal if it makes the name fit better, with a vertical line on the left.^[1] The Ancient Egyptian word for it was shenu, and it was essentially an expanded shen ring. In Demotic, the cartouche was reduced to a pair of brackets and a vertical line.

Of the five royal titularies it was the prenomen, the throne name, also referred to as the, and the "Son of Ra" titulary,^[2] the so-called nomen, the name given at birth, which were enclosed by a cartouche.^[3]

At times amulets were given the form of a cartouche displaying the name of a king and placed in tombs. Such items are often important to archaeologists for dating the tomb and its contents.^[4] 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 .^[5] Egyptians believed that if you had your name written down somewhere, then you would not disappear after you died. A cartouche attached to a coffin satisfied this requirement. ^[6] There were periods in Egyptian history when people refrained from inscribing these amulets with a name, for fear they might fall into somebody's hands conferring power over the bearer of the name.^[7]

1 Etymology
2 Hieroglyph use of cartouche and half-cartouche
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

Etymology [edit]

The term cartouche was first applied by 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 (cartouche in French).^[8]

Hieroglyph use of cartouche and half-cartouche [edit]

In the Rosetta Stone, the cartouche hieroglyph is used for the word "name", Egyptian rn.^[9] For the cartouche cut in half, the "half-cartouche hieroglyph", Gardiner's sign listed no. V11, (the cartouche hieroglyph is V10), is used in the Egyptian language for words meaning: "to cut, to divide, to separate".

References [edit]

General

Budge. The Rosetta Stone, E. A. Wallace Budge, (Dover Publications), c. 1929, Dover edition(unabridged), 1989. (softcover, ISBN 0-486-26163-8)

Specific

^ http://artyfactory.org/egyptian_art/cartouche_lesson/cartouche_lesson.htm
^ Ancient-egypt.org
^ Allen, James Peter, Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, Cambridge University Press 2000, p.65
^ cf. Thomas Eric Peet, William Leonard Stevenson Loat, The Cemeteries of Abydos. Part 3. 1912-1913, Adamant Media Corporation, ISBN 1-4021-5715-0, p.23
^ http://www.dcsd.org/district.cfm?subpage=541292
^ http://egypt.mrdonn.org/cartouche.html
^ Alfred Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, Adamant Media Corporation 2001, ISBN 1-4021-9366-1, pp.293-295
^ White, Jon Manchip, Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt, Courier Dover 2002, p.175
^ Budge, 1929, 1989. The Rosetta Stone, p. 124-169.