Hieroglyphs 101 · Chapter 05

Names in rings

You already own twenty-six sounds. That is enough, right now, to read the name of a king who has been dead for four thousand three hundred years. This chapter hands you three more signs and then puts them to work immediately, on stone.

Three signs, and what they open

Draw all three now. 𓍷V10 · the cartouche — rope ring around royal names rewards a slow hand: it is one continuous loop with a small tie at one end, not two separate strokes.

The ring around a name

Egyptian scribes did not leave a royal name loose on the line. They drew a rope around it — a single loop, knotted at one end, that marks everything inside as a king’s or queen’s name and nothing else. On stone, carved in relief, it is one unbroken oval. This site prints it as two half-brackets, 𓍹 at the start and 𓍺 at the close, so that you can always see where the name begins and ends without losing the line of text around it. Both conventions draw the same rope; only the typography differs.

Now use it.

Reading 1 — a king’s name, whole

Teti founded the Sixth Dynasty. His name is short, and every sign in it is already yours:

Three signs — 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread twice, 𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed once — spell the name of a man who ruled Egypt before 2300 BCE. Read it again. That is not a reconstruction. That is his name.

Reading 2 — cold, with a gap

Pepi came to the throne two reigns after Teti. His name spells its final sound generously, and it ends in a sign you have not met:

Read it cold before checking the gloss: 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool p, 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool p, then the reed doubled 𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed and the y-mark 𓏭Z4 · y · two strokes — three signs all spelling the name’s final glide, belt and suspenders in the manner of chapter 03. Egyptologists render it Ppj: Pepi. The box at the end tells you only that a person is meant; it does not spell a sound. You will own it when chapter 09 opens the classifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea of people and titles.

The name carved first

Egyptian scribes had a courtesy rule with real teeth: when a king’s or a god’s name shared a phrase with other words, the name was carved first, out of respect — even when grammar reads it last. This is honorific transpositionwriting a king's or god's name first out of respect, even though it is read in its normal grammatical place, and it is not a scholarly abstraction; you can see it happen.

An estate name from Teti’s reign means, in full, “Ptah-satisfies-Teti” — the god Ptah doing something for the king. Grammatically Teti’s name sits at the end of the phrase. On the stone it sits at the head:

Look at the sign order against the reading order: Ttj is carved first, 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed, and read last. Nobody made a mistake. The scribe put the king’s name where the eye lands first, and trusted the reader to sort out the grammar. You just caught a four-thousand-year-old act of deference, in the order of the signs themselves.

The rings that cracked the script

One more ring, as a preview, not a graded reading. Foreign rulers of Egypt had no hieroglyphic name of their own, so their names had to be spelled the way any foreign word is spelled — sound by sound. That single fact turned the cartouchethe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing into the crowbar of decipherment: a ring around a foreign name was a ring around pure phonetics, with nothing pictorial hiding the sounds.

You can already sound out most of it: 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool p, 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread t, 𓅓G17 · m · owl m, 𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed y, 𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth s. Two faces are new — 𓍯V4 · wꜣ · lasso — wa, a lasso, carrying the o-sound, and 𓃭E23 · rw · recumbent lion — rw, a lion, carrying L. Egyptian had no native sign for L; the lion was borrowed to spell a sound the language itself did not need. Champollion’s whole breakthrough started with rings exactly like this one.

Drill before you go on

1. Draw the cartouchethe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing — the rope loop, tie and all — from memory.
2. Write Teti’s name, 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed, inside a ring of your own drawing.
3. Read Pepi’s name cold, without looking at the gloss above.
4. Explain to an imaginary student why a lion sits in Ptolemy’s name.

Next: the offering formula — Egypt’s most-written sentence, and you will read every sign of it.