An isolated quantum system often shows relaxation to a quasi-stationary state before reaching thermal equilibrium. Such a pre-thermalized state was observed in recent experiments in a one-dimensional Bose gas after it had been coherently split into two. Although the existence of local conserved quantities is usually considered to be the key ingredient of pre-thermalization, the question of whether non-local correlations between the subsystems can influence pre-thermalization of the entire system has remained unanswered. Here we study the dynamics of coherently split one-dimensional Bose gases and find that the initial entanglement combined with energy degeneracy due to parity and translation invariance strongly affects the long-term behaviour of the system. The mechanism of this entanglement prethermalization is quite general and not restricted to one-dimensional Bose gases. In view of recent experiments with a small and well-defined number of ultracold atoms, our predictions based on exact few-body calculations could be tested in experiments.