'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.
How Fast can Sharks Swim? Whale sharks are slow swimmers and their top speed is no more than 5 miles (8 kilometers per hour) probably due to the fact that whale shark is the biggest fish in the world. It reaches a length of 40 ft (12 m) and weighs up to 13 tons (12 metric tons). Great white sharks are one of the fast movers in water. They are able to reach speeds of 25 miles per hour (40 km/h). They swim just below the waterâs surface. The white sharkâs body is built for the speed and its swift-moving ability makes it even more lethal killing machine.