Cartouches were used in ancient Egypt as name plates for people of great importance. We at the DecalZone feel that honor should be extended to the masses. Below you will find a quick explanation on how to make one of your own in Egyptian hieroglyphs and customize the color, orientation, and size of your decal.

Spelling Your Name Phonetically:
For this translation program to be its most accurate you must first convert your name, or whatever you want your final cartouche to say, to it's phonetic spelling. In other words, what the name would sound like. There is a catch, in Egyptian they rarely used vowel except when they were at the beginning of a name or where confusion resulted by not including them. Also, the ee sound in geek, for instance, was represented by the y so you would spell it phonetically gyk. There are special characters for CH and SH sound (So when you make your selections below select the ch rather than a c and an h, for instance). Lastly, there are no spaces, even if there is more than one word. My guess is that paper, and gold, for that matter, was very expensive and the scribes didn't want to waste it.

A couple other examples:
Fred = frd
Joe = jo
Ethel = Ethl
Cherrie = chry
DecalZone = dyclzon

Numbers:
Ancient Egyptians did not have separate symbols for one through nine (the concept of representing nothing with a zero was a few centuries away) but instead had symbols for 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 (this last also represented infinity). So, 1,235 would be 1,000  100 100  10 10 10  1 1 1 1 1.