Egyptian Cartouches

In ancient Egypt, kings, and sometimes others, encircled their hieroglyphic names with a design that we now call a cartouche. While it was 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.

Lower School Art Club members became pharaohs themselves for this project, using their own name on the inside of a cartouche shape. Students used special wooden tools to emboss their names in hieroglyphics on pieces of thin aluminum, making them raised. They then painted a black ink over the surface and buffed it with steel wool to make it appear ancient and stone-like. Lastly, they painted their border a rich metallic color and wrote a secret message around it in hieroglyphics.