'Cartouche' is actually a French word meaning 'gun cartridge'. When Napoleon's soldiers were in Egypt, they nicknamed this shape 'cartouche' because it reminded them of the shape of their gun cartridges, or bullets. At the time, people could not read hieroglyphic writing, so they did not know that the cartouche surrounded the name of the pharaoh. 'Cartouche' became so commonly used that it has remained the standard name for the shape around the name of an Egyptian pharaoh or queen. Were royal names always written inside cartouches? In the first three dynasties, royal names were written inside a rectangle called a 'serekh'.
Maximum Speed. The maximum swimming speed for humans is approximately 2 meters per second, or approximately 4.5 miles per hour, Dutch researchers Huub Toussaint and Martin Truijens reported in the journal Animal Biology in 2005 â only 16 percent of the maximum land speeds of elite human sprinters.
Swimming Speed of the Average Shark. The general rule of thumb is that sharks can cruise at about 5 mph (8 kph), the speed of the fastest Olympic swimmer. If you're just a good swimmer, they have you beat. But often they are swimming around at a slower speed of about 1.5 mph (2.4 kph). But sharks can swim much faster when they are attacking, about 12 mph or 20 kph, the speed of a running human on land. You're not going to be able to swim away fast enough, you'd need a boat or jet ski or some other equipment.