Cartouche

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Categories: Egyptian artefact types | Ornaments

For other uses, see Cartouche (disambiguation).

Ancient egyptian cartouche of Thutmose III, Karnak, Egypt.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oblong enclosure with a horizontal line 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. 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 parentheses and a vertical line.

Of the five royal titularies it was the throne name, also referred to as prenomen, and the "Son of Re" titulary, the so-called nomen, i.e. the name given at birth, which were enclosed by a cartouche.^[1]

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.^[2] 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.^[3]

Etymology

It is said that the label 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).^[4]

References

^ 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 1402157150, p.23
^ Alfred Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, Adamant Media Corporation 2001, ISBN 1402193661, pp.293-295
^ White, Jon Manchip, Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt, Courier Dover 2002, p.175