The Egyptian Cartouche

Every March I spend the entire month taking my students through a mini art history lesson. While they're quite young and don't necessarily remember or comprehend everything, I still believe an introduction to fine art is important at an early age.

So let's begin this month's activities in the ancient world with an Egyptian cartouche.

A cartouche is a sort of royal name plate from ancient Egypt. Shaped like an oval with a horizontal line at the bottom, hieroglyphs inside indicated a Pharaoh's name. It was believed that by writing their name within the oval the Pharaoh would be protected in both life and death. It was common for royals to have a cartouche on their tomb and even as an amulet. Originally only royals had their names inscribed on a cartouche, but later the practice became common for non-royals too.

Today we're making our own cartouche the simple way, by cutting and pasting from a printed hieroglyph alphabet.

materials:

hieroglyph alphabet

paper

glue

scissors

marker/pencil/crayons

get to work:

1. The first part of the lesson requires explaining what a cartouche is and how it was used. In addition you might want to show the children where Egypt is on a map and explain that this was a practice from a very long time ago.

2. Once you're ready to start, help the children identify the letters in their names according to the hieroglyph alphabet. (You can print the one above or this one from Scholastic).

3. Have each child draw their own cartouche shape on their paper.

4. Now the children can cut out the symbols for their name and glue them vertically. (You might want to point out that most cartouches were vertical , which might seem weird for modern readers who are used to reading horizontally).