Ancient Egyptian Cartouche

In ancient Egypt, kings, and sometimes others, encircled their name hieroglyphs with a design that we now call a cartouche. While we may find it 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. Later, in the demotic script, the cartouche was reduced to a pair of parentheses and a vertical line.
The term, "cartouche" is a relatively modern one coined by the soldiers of Napoleon's expedition in Egypt, who saw in the sign the likeness of the cartridges, or "cartouche" used in their own guns. The cartouche, known in ancient Egypt as the shenu, is derived from the Egyptian verb, Sheni, which means to encircle. It is very similar to the shen sign, a more circular form, and in fact the earliest use of the cartouche in which the king's name was written was circular and identical with that sign. So in order to understand the cartouche we must know something of the shen sign.  The circular shen sign, or ring evokes the concept of eternity through its form, having no beginning or end, and its solar aspect is symbolized by the sun disk often depicted in the This vulture from the tomb of Tutankhamun holds shen in each clawcenter of the circle. It was also a symbol of protection, and as a hieroglyphic symbol in Egyptian art, it can have the meanings of both "eternity" and "protection". As a sign of "eternity", the shen is frequently associated with representations of Heh, the god of eternity, and often forms the base of the notched palm-branches symbolizing "years," which is held by this deity. It is also mirrored in the shape of the ouroboros, the serpent which bites its own tail.
While the earliest use of a cartouche seems to have been identical in form to the shen sign, early in Egyptian history, the form of the shen ring was lengthened in order to hold the increased number of hieroglyphs In this double cartouche box, each part surmounted by the two feathers crown, is depicted King Tutankhamen himself, rather than his name resulting from longer royal names and fuller orthography. In this way, the shen continued to be used as a sign with its own meaning while the cartouche, or shenu, became the standard holder of the royal name. Occasionally, one may find the name of a god or goddess in a cartouche. This was especially the case for Osiris-Onnophris and Isis in the temple inscriptions of the Greco-Roman Period.
The cartouche hieroglyph also appears in many decorative contexts such as the finger rings and decorated cartouche-shaped boxes. Some of these rings and chests were based on the form of the twin cartouches which framed both the king's most important names, though in these examples the cartouches often encircle small representations of a solar-related deity or the king himself rather than his name. In many instances, solar disks with uraei and plumes surmounted cartouches, possibly alluding to the solar connotations of the device as well as the solar element in the names of kings, such as Tutankhamen (Nebkheperure) and Ramesses.