Cartouche

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A cartouche is an oval shape with a line at one end that marks a royal name in Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is usually written vertically with the line on the right, but it can be horizontal if the name fits, with the line at the end in the reading direction. The earliest examples appear toward the end of the Third Dynasty, but the symbol became common in the Fourth Dynasty under Sneferu.

The ancient word for cartouche was shenu, and the cartouche is basically an expanded shen ring. In Demotic script it was reduced to a pair of brackets and a vertical line. Of the five royal titles, the cartouche typically encloses the prenomen (the throne name) and the "Son of Ra" name (the nomen).

Amulets shaped like cartouches with a king’s name were sometimes placed in tombs, helping archaeologists date the tomb and its contents. Cartouches were worn by pharaohs to protect their name from evil spirits in life and after death, and today the symbol is seen as a sign of good luck and protection.

The name “cartouche” was given by French soldiers who thought the symbol looked like a cartridge used for muskets. As a hieroglyph, a cartouche can represent the Egyptian word for "name" and is listed as no. V10 in Gardiner's Sign List.