Cartouche
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche ( kar-TOOSH) is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. The first examples of the cartouche are associated with pharaohs at the end of the Third Dynasty, but the feature did not come into common use until the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu.
As a hieroglyph, a cartouche can represent the Egyptian-language word for "name". It is listed as no. V10 in Gardiner's Sign List. While the cartouche is usually vertical with a horizontal line, if it makes the name fit better it can be horizontal, with a vertical line at the end (in the direction of reading). Demotic script reduced the cartouche to a pair of brackets and a vertical line.
The term "cartouche" comes from French soldiers who noticed that the oval symbol frequently repeated on the pharaonic ruins they encountered resembled a muzzle-loading firearm's paper powder cartridge, called cartouche in French. The ancient Egyptian word for this oval symbol was shenu (compare with Coptic ϣⲛⲉ šne yielding eventual sound changes), and the cartouche was essentially an expanded shen ring.
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