Why Is That Name in an Oval? A Ring That Protects What It Encloses

A cartouche is an oval loop with a line at one end, drawn around a name, and the shape derives from a loop of rope tied at one end, which in Egyptian symbolism encircles and protects what it contains. Enclosing a royal name in it therefore asserts protection and also asserts that the person named rules everything the sun encircles, which is the explanation Egyptian sources themselves give. Practically it functions as a marker, telling any reader instantly that the signs inside form a royal name rather than ordinary text, which matters in a script where the same signs serve several purposes. Kings held several names and two of them were written this way, giving the pairs of cartouches that appear throughout Egyptian monuments.

The device supplied exactly what the decipherers needed:

• •It identified which groups of signs were names without any knowledge of the language
• •Names are pronounced similarly across languages, so the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone supplied candidates
• •Matching a cartouche to a Greek royal name gave sound values for the signs inside it
• •Comparing several cartouches containing shared letters confirmed those values independently
• •Thomas Young established that cartouches contained names and read several signs
• •Jean-Francois Champollion extended the method and announced the decipherment in 1822

The names themselves were more elaborate than a single word. A ruler held a set of five names acquired at accession, each with its own introductory title and its own significance, and the two written in cartouches were the birth name and the throne name adopted on becoming king. Those names were statements rather than labels, being constructed from words meaning things about the ruler's relationship to the gods and to the land, so translating one produces a phrase rather than a name. That is why the same ruler appears under different names in different sources and why matching Egyptian records against Greek and biblical accounts required establishing which name a foreign writer had heard. Queens ruling in their own right used them, and so did a small number of others.

The term has a second life in architecture and design that causes occasional confusion. In classical and later European decoration a cartouche is an ornamental panel, usually oval or shield-shaped with a scrolled border, carrying an inscription, a coat of arms or a monogram, and it appears on buildings, monuments, maps and title pages throughout the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The connection is the function of framing a name or device conspicuously, which is why the same word was applied. Map cartouches are a genre of their own, holding the title, the scale, the maker's name and frequently elaborate imagery about the territory shown, and they are studied as evidence of how mapmakers presented the places they charted.

Because a cartouche marks a name conspicuously, it also marks what to attack, and erased cartouches are a substantial category of evidence. Successors chiselled out the names of predecessors they wished to remove from the record, which is documented repeatedly and which in Egyptian understanding attacked the person's continued existence rather than merely their reputation, since being named was part of surviving death. The most extensive campaign followed the reign of a king whose religious changes were reversed after his death, with his name and his god's name removed from monuments across the country. Ironically the erasures preserve the information, since a chiselled cartouche is conspicuous and frequently legible, and the campaign to remove one ruler is how his existence was noticed.

The loop derives from a knotted rope encircling and protecting what it contains, and it marks a royal name unmistakably within a script where signs serve several purposes. That marking is what allowed decipherment, since names could be matched against the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone. Erasing a cartouche attacked the person's survival after death and is conspicuous enough to preserve the information.