cartouche

thumb|upright|alt=A stone face carved with coloured hieroglyphics. Two cartouches - ovoid shapes with hieroglyphics inside - are visible at the bottom.|Birth and throne cartouches of Pharaoh Seti I, from [[KV17 at the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Neues Museum, Berlin.]]

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche ( ) 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. 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). The ancient Egyptian word for cartouche was (compare with Coptic šne yielding eventual sound changes), and the cartouche was essentially an expanded shen ring. Demotic script reduced the cartouche to a pair of brackets and a vertical line.