Cartouche maker
Write your name in hieroglyphs.
Type a name and see it spelled in real Egyptian signs inside a royal cartouche, the frame pharaohs' names were written in. Download it, share it, and learn what each sign actually says.
A modern, letter-by-letter approximation using real Egyptian signs, not a translation. Letters A to Z and spaces; accents are dropped. Up to 12 signs fit in the cartouche.
How the spelling works
Hieroglyphs do not spell letters; they spell sounds. This tool works the other way round, from your name's spelling, using the conventional museum phonetic alphabet: each Latin letter is matched to the Egyptian uniliteral sign whose sound comes closest, so silent letters and letter pairs such as TH are spelled as written. R becomes the mouth, M the owl, N the ripple of water, B the foot. A few letters need two signs (X is loaf plus folded cloth, Y a doubled reed), and sounds Egyptian never wrote, like E and O, borrow the nearest weak consonant or glide.
It is a simplification, and a well-earned one: ancient scribes wrote no vowels, packed signs into tidy squares called quadrats, and added silent classifiers to the ends of words. But the signs themselves here are the real thing, drawn from Gardiner's sign list and rendered by JSesh, the typesetting system Egyptologists use. The stacking you see in the cartouche follows the same square-packing instinct as real inscriptions: two flat signs share a column, tall signs stand alone.
The oval frame is a cartouche, the knotted rope the Egyptians drew around royal names. When Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822, royal names were his first keys: Ptolemy in the cartouches of the Rosetta Stone, and Ptolemy and Cleopatra on an obelisk from Philae. Both are foreign names, spelled out sign by sign much as yours is here.
Questions people ask
How do you write your name in hieroglyphics?
The usual modern method spells a name letter by letter with the hieroglyphs Egyptologists call uniliteral signs, each of which wrote a single consonant. Each letter is matched to the sign whose sound is closest: the mouth for R, the owl for M, the water ripple for N, and so on. This tool applies that letter-by-letter chart and draws the result inside a royal cartouche. It works from spelling, not pronunciation, so silent letters are spelled too: the result is an approximation, not a translation.
Is there a real hieroglyphic alphabet?
Not in the modern sense. Egyptian writing had around two dozen uniliteral signs that each wrote one consonant, and these are often presented as a hieroglyphic alphabet, but the script also used hundreds of two- and three-sound signs and silent classifiers. The letter-for-letter chart used to spell modern names is a museum and tourist convention built on the uniliteral signs, not how ancient scribes actually spelled Egyptian words.
What is a cartouche?
A cartouche is the oval ring with a bar at one end that ancient Egyptians drew around royal names. It represents a loop of rope (an elongated form of the shen ring, a symbol of eternal protection) and marked the name inside as belonging to a king or queen. Cartouches gave decipherment its foothold: the Rosetta Stone's cartouches spell Ptolemy, and an obelisk from Philae carries both Ptolemy and Cleopatra, which let Champollion match sign to sound.
Are these real hieroglyphs?
Yes. Every sign in the cartouche is a genuine hieroglyph from Gardiner's sign list, rendered by JSesh, the academic standard for Egyptological typesetting: the same signs carved on temple walls. What is modern is the convention of using them letter by letter to spell names from other languages, which the ancient Egyptians themselves only did for foreign names such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra.
Why does my name use a sign for a different sound?
Ancient Egyptian did not have every sound that English has, and it wrote no vowels at all. So the conventional chart borrows the closest available sign: the basket (a K sound) covers C, the quail chick (a W sound) covers O and U, and the vulture and reed (weak consonants Egyptologists call aleph and yodh) stand in for A, E and I. Every sign's real Egyptian reading is shown in the sign-by-sign list under your cartouche.
Want to actually read them?
Start with the free lessons on this site, beginning with how to spot a king's name. The Hierolyte app adds a glyph a day and flashcard review, free on the App Store.
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