Free Hieroglyphics Translator & Cartouche Name Generator

A cartouche is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, showing that the text inside is a royal name. The king's throne name and his "Son of Ra" name were each enclosed in one. It is sign V10 in Gardiner's Sign List (𓍷).

The Egyptians called the oval shenu; it is essentially an expanded shen ring (V9, 𓍶). The word "cartouche" originally meant a muzzleloader's paper powder cartridge; the French with Napoleon's force in Egypt (1798-1801) gave the oval that name.

Cartouches unlocked hieroglyphs. In 1822 Champollion saw copies of the Philae obelisk inscriptions, where William John Bankes had noted the names Ptolemaios and Kleopatra in both Greek and Egyptian. Comparing the two cartouches let him identify the phonetic signs of Kleopatra. That year, with the help of the Rosetta Stone, he announced the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts in Paris. Try Ptolemy and Cleopatra to see the shared signs: P, T, O, L, and E.

Egyptian writing used more than 1,000 signs. A small set, the uniliteral signs, each stand for a single consonant; Egyptian distinguished 24 consonant sounds (Edel 1955). They are the closest thing to an alphabet, so modern name generators spell names with them. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels.

English letters without an Egyptian sound get the nearest sign: E uses the reed leaf like I, O uses the quail chick (w), V uses the horned viper (f), L uses the lion (as in Greek-era names), J uses the cobra (dj), X is written K + S, and C is the basket (k), or the folded cloth (s) before E, I, or Y.

Hieroglyphs ran in rows or columns, usually right to left. Read toward the faces: signs of people and animals look toward the start of the line. These glyphs face left, so the cartouche reads left to right, or top to bottom when vertical.