Cartouche in the context of "Seti I"

Ancient Egyptian literature was written with the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. It represents the oldest corpus of Egyptian literature. Along with Sumerian literature, it is considered the world's earliest literature.

Writing in ancient Egypt—both hieroglyphic and hieratic—first appeared in the late 4th millennium BC during the late phase of predynastic Egypt. By the Old Kingdom (26th century BC to 22nd century BC), literary works included funerary texts, epistles and letters, hymns and poems, and commemorative autobiographical texts recounting the careers of prominent administrative officials. It was not until the early Middle Kingdom (21st century BC to 17th century BC) that a narrative Egyptian literature was created. This was a "media revolution" which, according to Richard B. Parkinson, was the result of the rise of an intellectual class of scribes, new cultural sensibilities about individuality, unprecedented levels of literacy, and mainstream access to written materials. The creation of literature was thus an elite exercise, monopolized by a scribal class attached to government offices and the royal court of the ruling pharaoh. However, there is no full consensus among modern scholars concerning the dependence of ancient Egyptian literature on the sociopolitical order of the royal courts.

The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place. Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as purely ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.

The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 by members of Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt, bore a parallel text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. It was hoped that the Egyptian text could be deciphered through its Greek translation, especially in combination with the evidence from the Coptic language, the last stage of the Egyptian language. Doing so proved difficult, despite halting progress made by Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Johan David Åkerblad. Thomas Young, building on their work, observed that demotic characters were derived from hieroglyphs and identified several of the phonetic signs in demotic. He also identified the meaning of many hieroglyphs, including phonetic glyphs in a cartouche containing the name of an Egyptian king of foreign origin, Ptolemy V. He was convinced, however, that phonetic hieroglyphs were used only in writing non-Egyptian words. In the early 1820s Champollion compared Ptolemy's cartouche with others and realised the hieroglyphic script was a mixture of phonetic and ideographic elements. His claims were initially met with scepticism and with accusations that he had taken ideas from Young without giving credit, but they gradually gained acceptance. Champollion went on to roughly identify the meanings of most phonetic hieroglyphs and establish much of the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Egyptian. Young, meanwhile, largely deciphered demotic using the Rosetta Stone in combination with other Greek and demotic parallel texts.

The early life of Cleopatra VII covers the period from Cleopatra's birth in early 69 BC to her accession to the throne during or before March 51 BC. Cleopatra was born to the reigning pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt, Ptolemy XII Auletes; the identity of her mother is disputed and is presumed to have been Cleopatra V or Cleopatra VI, who may have been the same person. During her early childhood, Cleopatra was brought up in the palace of Alexandria in Egypt and received a primarily Hellenistic Greek education. By adulthood she was well-versed in many languages, including Egyptian, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Median, Parthian, Latin, and her native Koine Greek.

Cleopatra's father was a client ruler of the Roman Republic. When the Romans annexed Cyprus and Ptolemy XII's brother Ptolemy of Cyprus chose to commit suicide rather than go into exile, Ptolemy XII became unpopular with the masses in Egypt for offering no public reaction to the events. He and a daughter, ostensibly Cleopatra and not Arsinoe IV, were exiled from Egypt during a revolt. This allowed Cleopatra's older sister Berenice IV to claim the throne in 58 BC, ruling jointly with Cleopatra VI. Ptolemy XII and Cleopatra traveled to Roman Italy, staying outside Rome at the villa of their Roman patron, Pompey the Great. After Ptolemy XII orchestrated the assassinations of Berenice IV's diplomats in Rome, seeking to gain Roman favor, he and Cleopatra left the city's hostile environment and settled at Ephesus in Anatolia.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a serekh is a rectangular enclosure representing the niched or gated façade of a palace surmounted by (usually) the Horus falcon, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. The serekh was the earliest convention used to set apart the royal name in ancient Egyptian iconography, predating the later and better known cartouche by four dynasties and five to seven hundred years.

Saï is a large island in the Nile River in Nubia between the second and third cataracts, in the country of Sudan. It is 12 km long and 5.5 km wide. Saï was intermittently occupied by the Egyptians during the New Kingdom. In the Makurian period it was the center of a bishopric, while in the second half of the 16th century the Ottomans founded a fortress on the island.

The northeast portion of the island contains a New Kingdom of Egypt temple and numerous mills associated with ancient gold production. Nearby is an Ottoman Empire fort composed of sandstone quarried along the river banks, and spolia bearing the cartouche of Amenhotep IV, amongst other 18th Dynasty rulers. Numerous round tombs are close by.

Ankhkheperure-Merit-Neferkheperure/Waenre/Aten Neferneferuaten (Ancient Egyptian: nfr-nfrw-jtn), or "Neferneferuaten", is the name of a queen regnant ('female king') of ancient Egypt who reigned in her own right near the end of the Amarna Period during the Eighteenth Dynasty. Her name features feminine gender traces, and one of her epithets was Akhet-en-hyes ("Beneficial for her husband"). This epithet also features in one version of her nomen (birth name) cartouche. (See Ancient Egyptian royal titulary.) The name Neferneferuaten translates as either "(“Perfect/Beautiful is the perfection/beauty of Aten”)

She is to be distinguished from the male king Smenkhkare, with whom she shared the prenomen (throne name) Ankhkheperure. However, Smenkhkare was a male king who was married to Akhenaten and Nefertiti's daughter Meritaten but his prenomen bore no additional epithets and he disappears from the historical records shortly after Year 12 of Akhenaten.

The Ardabil Carpet (or Ardebil Carpet) is the name of two different famous Persian carpets, the larger and better-known now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Originally there were two presumably identical carpets, and the London carpet, as restored and reconstructed in the 19th century, uses sections from both. It now measures 34 ft 3 in × 17 ft 6+7⁄8 in (1,044 cm × 535.5 cm). The other carpet, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and smaller at 23 ft 7 in × 13 ft 1+1⁄2 in (718.82 cm × 400.05 cm), was made up of the sections in adequate condition unused for the London carpet. Both carpets are now smaller (shorter in particular) than they would have been originally, and there are other fragments in various collections that appear to come from the reconstruction process. The carpets have a typical Tabriz design, with one central medallion and smaller, ornate designs surrounding. Such medallions and shapes were central to the design and reality of Persian gardens, a common symbol of paradise for followers of Islam.

A cartouche on the London carpet contains the date A.H. 946, or 1539-40, which is thought to be the earliest date on any Persian carpet.

In ancient Egypt, a shen ring was a circle with a line tangent to it, represented in hieroglyphs as a stylised loop of a rope, bound to a stick. The tool was used by builders and architects. Shen rings can most often be seen in the clutches of Horus. The word shen itself means "encircling" in ancient Egyptian, while the shen ring itself represents eternal protection. What the French called a cartouche is in fact an elongated shen ring encircling a name of a pharaoh or god/goddess, thus "eternally protecting" that personage.

In Gardiner's sign list, it is sign V9.