Hieroglyphs Addenda · Signs
cartouche
| Name | V10 |
|---|---|
| Reads | — |
| Means | the cartouche — rope ring around royal names |
| Taught in | 05 · Names in rings |
Where it comes from
A loop of rope with its ends tied off — pulled into an oval frame around a king’s name. It reads nothing; it encloses: the rope that rings the name marks everything inside as royal, a circuit of protection the texts themselves call šnw, “that which the sun encircles.”
How to remember it
The cartouche is a rope fence around the most valuable words in Egypt. Wherever you see the ring, a king or queen lives inside it — the frame is the crown.
In the wild
The cartouche never stands alone: in the corpus it appears only wrapped around royal names, and every such name carries signs beyond this course’s inventory — so this one page shows no attested line, rather than show one broken by boxes. Its working life is on display in 101’s chapter 05, where Ptolemy’s ring cracked the decipherment, and on the Rosetta Stone itself.