Cartouche

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In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche ( kar-TOOSH from French from Italian cartuccia) is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a 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. As a hieroglyph, a cartouche can represent the Egyptian-language word for "name". It is listed as no. V10 in Gardiner's Sign List. While the cartouche is usually vertical with a horizontal line, it can be angled perpendicularly to fit a name better with a vertical line at the end (in the direction of reading). The succeeding Demotic script reduces the cartouche to a pair of brackets and a vertical line. The term cartouche originally meant a muzzleloader's paper powder cartridge from observations by French soldiers noticing the oval symbol frequently repeated on pharaonic ruins they encountered resembling...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0