Your name in hieroglyphs
Type your name in Arabic or English and see it in Ancient Egyptian script — with a full breakdown of every sign.
Before you write your name
A cartouche is not decoration — it is a rank
A cartouche is an oval loop of drawn rope, its two ends knotted at the base. The shape is the meaning: a rope tied around a name to protect it. Egyptians drew it around the name of a king or a queen — and only theirs. An ordinary person's name was written without one.
The common confusion is that a cartouche is “how you write a name in hieroglyphs”. It is not: the name is written with the signs, and the cartouche is the frame saying its owner was royal. We offer it because it is the picture people have in mind — and we have to say that it was royal.
- Who got one
- Kings and queens alone
- The shape
- A knotted rope protecting the name
- The word itself
- “Cartouche” is French, given by Napoleon's soldiers for its likeness to a gun cartridge
The cartouche enclosed the names of kings and queens only — ordinary people did not get one. We offer it as a stylistic choice.
This is an example — Cleopatra, the name Champollion read first. Type yours in the field and it changes at once.
How it is read out
كَرِيوبِتِر
krjwbtr
This is a convention, not ancient speech. Egyptian wrote no vowels, so nobody knows how the words sounded. What you hear is the Egyptological reading — the convention scholars agree on: a short vowel between consonants. We use an Arabic voice because Arabic has ḥ, ḫ, ʿ and q — Egyptian consonants an English voice physically cannot produce.
Sign by sign
| Sign | From | Sound | Depicts |
|---|---|---|---|
| V31 | ك | k | Basket with handle |
| D21 | ل | r | Mouth⚠ Egyptian did not distinguish l from r in writing. |
| M17 | ي | j | Flowering reed |
| G43 | و | w | Quail chick |
| D58 | ب | b | Foot and lower leg |
| X1 | ت | t | Loaf of bread |
| D21 | ر | r | Mouth |
| B1 | — | not pronounced | Seated woman |
⚠ Signs flagged above are approximations — the original sound does not exist in Ancient Egyptian.
This is a phonetic approximation of your name in the Ancient Egyptian writing system, not a translation. The Egyptians did not write vowels, and some sounds in Arabic and English have no Egyptian equivalent, so we substitute the nearest attested sound. The sign data is still under scholarly review.