Silver Cartouche Jewelry
In ancient Egypt kings & queens encircled their name hieroglyphs & with a design that we now call a cartouche & . While we may find it rarely used to enclose the name of non-kings, for the most part, the cartouche & 's presence identifies the name it encloses as the king of Egypt. A cartouche & is an oval ring that is a hieroglyph representation of a length of rope folded and tied at one end. It symbolized everything that the sun encircled and is thus an indication of the king's rule of the cosmos. Later, in the demotic script, the cartouche & was reduced to a pair of parentheses and a vertical line.
The term, "cartouche" & is a relatively modern one coined by the soldiers of Napoleon's expedition in Egypt, who saw in the sign the likeness of the cartridges, or "cartouche" & used in their own guns. The cartouche, known in ancient Egypt as the shenu, is derived from the Egyptian verb, Sheni, which means to encircle. It is very similar to the shen sign, a more circular form, and in fact the earliest use of the cartouche & in which the king's name was written were circular and identical with that sign. So in order to understand the cartouche & we must know something of the shen sign