What is Ancient Egyptian Cartouche?
- A cartouche was meant to protect against evil spirits both in this life and the life-after.
- Cartouche is a rectangle frame with curved corners, contains hieroglyphs symbols/letters that represent a royal person name or an ancient Egyptian God.
- There are few examples that are based on the cartouche of Tutankhamun, who was one of the famous Egyptian kings.
- At the bottom of that rectangle, there is a looped rope which represents a magical power that protect the name inside it.
- It can be horizontally or vertically.
Write Your Name in Hieroglyphics
The ancient Egyptian language is named Hieroglyphs, which is written in pictures, each picture/symbol represent a sound. Check out this complete set of the Ancient Egyptian alphabets/sound.
In this cartouche we have enclosed the hieroglyphs that spell out the sounds of the name ‘Michael’. Note that although there are seven letters in the name ‘Michael’, there are only four basic sounds ‘M – I – K – L’. Therefore we only need to use the hieroglyphs that represent those sounds. A more detailed explanation of this translation process is given on our Hieroglyphic Alphabet pages.
Hieroglyphs should be arranged to create interesting designs instead of the straight lines that we use to arrange our letters and sentences.
Cartouches are usually positioned vertically but they can also be positioned horizontally to make them fit more comfortably into a design. The arrangement of the hieroglyphs inside is then reorganized to accommodate the horizontal layout.