page_title: Egyptian hieroglyphs
section_title: Cartouche
hierarchical_section_title: Egyptian hieroglyphs / Writing system / Additional signs / Cartouche
caption_attribution_description: English: Luxor Temple, Egypt. Cartouches for Ramesses II
context_page_description: Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems, the Greek and Aramaic scripts, the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts and the Arabic script and Brahmic family of scripts.
  The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the Early Bronze Age, around the 32nd century BC, with the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language dating to the Second Dynasty. Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period; during this period, the system made use of about 900 distinct signs.
context_section_description: Rarely, the names of gods are placed within a cartouche; the two last names of the sitting king are always placed within a cartouche:
  jmn-rꜥ, "Amon-Ra";
  qljwꜣpdrꜣ.t, "Cleopatra";
caption: Egyptian hieroglyphs with cartouches for the name Ramesses II, from the Luxor Temple, New Kingdom
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