Egyptian Cartouches

Posted by Jimmie | 0 comments

Hands-on activities are not just for elementary age children. Middle schoolers and even high school students also enjoy them and benefit from them. In fact, many projects are too advanced for younger children to manage successfully and require more skilled hands. Our potato stamp cartouches are a great example.

As part of our study of Ancient Egypt, my sixth grade daughter made hieroglyph potato stamps which she used to create both a mural and cartouches.

Here are the steps we followed to make the potato stamps:

• Wash and dry the potatoes.
• Cut the potatoes in half.
• Using a craft knife or woodworking tools, cut an outline into the potato’s surface.  For inspiration with the hieroglyph symbols, try this Full color Hieroglyph Alphabet (JPG) or this Detailed Hieroglyphics Alphabet (PDF). You may want to create your name using this Cartouche Generator.
• Then cut away the outside flesh of the potato around the outline, leaving a raised design.
• If that last step created a disaster, just cut the problem off, making another flat surface to start over on.
• Add details such as eyes or stripes into your stamp.

To use the stamps, we found that applying paint with a brush worked better than dipping the stamps into a puddle of paint.

Thinking it looked more like stone or papyrus, we used a brown paper bag for our hieroglyphic mural. Before mixing our colors, we looked at examples of Egyptian Art online and in a book to discover what colors were commonly used — brown, red, yellow, blue, green, and white.

Then Sprite created several different cartouches, some going right to left and others going top to bottom since cartouches can be read either way. Some were actual names using the phonetic hieroglyphics. Others were just a hodgepodge of attractive designs.

I made some printable cartouche templates and printed them onto yellow paper.  The template file also includes cartouche notebooking pages.  If you don’t want to create potato stamps, you can still use the templates for sketching hieroglyphs.

What kinds of hands-on activities have you used with Ancient Egypt?

Jimmie is a former public school teacher turned homeschooling stay-at-home-mom. A sense of humor, faith, and creativity keep her “pressing on” in her unique situation — living and traveling abroad with an only child in a bilingual environment. Visit her blog at Jimmie’s Collage.