Egyptian Cartouches

Artist or Art Form	Egyptian Cartouches
Project Type	Molding Clay
Name	Joyce Bottone
Grade	Fifth
Teacher/School	KHS/Dalton
Date of Presentation	February 2008
Resources Used	*Books: Website:* Other:
Project Description	*Description: Each child was given a black foam core board measuring (5"" x 13"") and a chunk of Crayola Molding Clay. We had already hot glued a border of pipe cleaners to each board and a wooden dowel to the bottom (so they knew what direction to work). We asked each child to look at the provided hieroglyphs charts to spell out their names. These characters where then hot glued onto the boards and then spray painted gold to resemble a CARTOUCHE. This project was chosen to hang throughout the an area of the school for Museum Night. We created a chain like look and hung these beautiful personalized cartouches. Materials: Crayola Molding Clay. Presentation Time*: 25 minutes
Presentation Content	We explained to the children that in ancient Egypt an alphabet of symbols and characters was formed to document everyday life. Hieroglyphs could be written in rows or columns and were read left to right or right to left. The way to figure out the beginning of the wording was to look and see which direction the animal/human figures were facing. They have found more than 2,000 hieroglyphs characters used in artifacts found throughout the years. Each hieroglyphs represents a common object in ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs could represent the sound of the object or they could represent an idea associated with the object. A modern type of hieroglyphs writing would be a rebus. A rebus is a picture puzzle that can be sounded out by reading the sounds symbolized by the pictures. When these sounds are read aloud together, the statements often become obvious. Example: pictures of an eye + heart + letter U
Comments	The kids had lots of fun making these. This was the only project we could do with the kids, due to their busy 5th grade curriculums. Thankfully, this tied in with what they were studying.