The owner of Discoveries, Steve Collins, travels to Cairo several times each year to meet with the workshop to help them produce the best possible jewelry for our customers.

We order cartouches every week of the year, sending the specific hieroglyphic symbols for each pendant, and our staff in Cairo delivers the orders to the workshop to make sure that each cartouche is made correctly. After a week or so of hand-crafting the orders, our staff then checks the quality before sending them to our warehouse in Colorado, where we make a final check and carefully package

Making cartouche jewelry is intricate and complex and most people are surprised to see how much work goes into each and every piece.  All of the workmanship is done completely by hand.  We could think of no better way to show this than to make a video of the process.

As you saw in the video, the cartouches are made one at a time with the hieroglyphs we have requested. Some are names, others are symbolic of pets, memories, astrological signs or just an arrangement of beautiful hieroglyphic, english, greek, or arabic symbols.

We are able to make cartouches in Sterling Silver, 14K gold, 18K gold, or in a combination of Silver with 14k symbols. We have many options to choose from, including two-sided, oxidized, diamond cut, and stone backed.

Each and every cartouche is hallmarked (stamped) by the Egyptian government to verify the metal content.

Want to know more about hieroglyphs? Check out this blog post.