Scarab

A beetle the size of a thumb walks backward across hot sand, shoving a ball of dung many times its own weight, steering by the light of the sun and the pale band of the Milky Way overhead. Egyptians watched this for centuries and saw something far larger than an insect at work.

The beetle was Scarabaeus sacer, the sacred dung beetle, and what struck the people of the Nile was not the dung but the pattern. The beetle rolled a sphere across the ground from east to west. Weeks later, new beetles climbed out of a buried ball as if the earth itself had made them. No one saw the eggs laid inside; the young simply appeared, alive, out of what looked like waste and death. From that single misunderstanding grew one of the most durable symbols any civilization has ever produced.

The Egyptian word for the beetle was kheper, and kheper also meant to come into being, to become, to exist. The same three consonants named the insect and carried the deepest idea the language had about creation. A thing that made itself out of nothing was kheper. So the beetle became the written sign for that idea, and the god who embodied it wore the beetle as his head.

That god was Khepri, the morning sun. Egyptians pictured him rolling the solar disk up over the eastern horizon at daybreak exactly as the beetle rolled its ball across the sand, and they set him in a cycle with the other faces of the sun: Khepri at dawn, Ra blazing at noon, Atum sinking red into the west at dusk. Like Atum, Khepri had fathered himself, needing no parent, and that self-generation was the whole point of him. The sun died each night in the underworld and climbed out newborn each morning, and the small dark beetle in the sand was its living proof.

Because the sign meant becoming and renewal, Egyptians wanted it close. They carved the scarab into small oval amulets, domed on top like the beetle’s own back, flat on the base, and wore them by the thousand. The underside was smoothed and cut with a name, a title, a short blessing, or a woven design, so the amulet doubled as a seal. A scribe would breathe on the cool stone, press it into a lump of wet Nile clay across a jar’s stopper, and lift it away to leave a tiny raised beetle standing guard over whatever was sealed inside. Kings issued large commemorative scarabs recording royal marriages, lion hunts, and the digging of a pleasure lake, mass-produced bulletins in stone scattered the length of the kingdom.

The material carried meaning of its own. Many scarabs were cut from steatite and glazed a bright blue-green, the color of new shoots and of life-giving water. Others were worked in green jasper, serpentine, carnelian, lapis lazuli, or molded faience. The choice was never only decorative; green and blue-green were the shades of resurrection.

The most serious scarab was reserved for the dead. In the funerary religion the heart was the seat of character, memory, and conscience, and it could speak. At the final judgment the heart of the dead was set on a great balance against the feather of Maat, truth itself, in the Hall of Two Truths. A heart weighed down by wrongdoing tipped the scale, and a waiting monster devoured its owner on the spot. Worse, a frightened heart might blurt out its owner’s sins and condemn him by accident. To guard against that, embalmers laid a large scarab, often the length of a palm and cut from green stone, directly over the breast where the heart lay. On its underside they inscribed Chapter 30B of the Book of the Dead, the words addressed to the heart on the scale: do not stand against me as a witness, do not oppose me before the keeper of the balance. The scarab bound the heart to silence, or answered in its place. It was a legal safeguard carved in the shape of an insect.

A scarab is a small thing. Most would sit hidden under a fingertip, and even the great heart scarabs rarely passed the width of a hand. The carving is economical: the head and wing-cases suggested with a few clean grooves, the legs sometimes folded tight against the body, sometimes left off the stone entirely. What mattered was the base and the belief behind it, not a faithful portrait of the animal.

What the amulet was thought to do followed straight from the beetle. It renewed. It wrapped the wearer in a share of the sun’s own stubborn habit of returning out of the dark. Worn in life it drew luck and the favor of Khepri; laid on the dead it promised rebirth and shielded the heart at the one trial that allowed no appeal. A scarab was a portable piece of the certainty that morning always comes.

Its limits were the limits of any made object. A scarab could be lost, chipped, stolen, or buried with the wrong body. Its funerary power leaned on the correct spell being present and correctly cut, and a botched or blank base weakened the charm. And the whole magnificent structure rested on a mistake about biology: the young beetles did not conjure themselves from dung but hatched from eggs a mother had hidden there in secret. The Egyptians never learned this. It never mattered. The symbol had long since outgrown the insect.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an Egyptian scarab?

An Egyptian scarab is an amulet and seal carved in the shape of the sacred dung beetle, Scarabaeus sacer. Egyptians wore them as jewelry, lucky charms, and stamp seals in daily life, and produced them for more than two thousand years, making the scarab one of the most common objects in the whole of ancient Egyptian culture.

Why was the scarab a symbol of rebirth?

The scarab symbolized rebirth because Egyptians watched new beetles emerge from a buried ball of dung and believed the insect created itself from nothing. They linked this to the sun, which appeared to die each night and be reborn each dawn, and to the god Khepri, who rolled the morning sun over the horizon just as the beetle rolls its ball.

What is a heart scarab and what was it for?

A heart scarab is a large scarab amulet, often the length of a palm and cut from green stone, laid over the chest of a mummy. Its job was to keep the dead person’s heart from testifying against him during the weighing of the heart, and it was usually inscribed with Chapter 30B of the Book of the Dead, which commands the heart not to speak out at the judgment.

Which Egyptian god is the scarab connected to?

The scarab is connected above all to Khepri, the scarab-headed god of the rising sun and self-creation. Because the Egyptian word for the beetle, kheper, also meant “to come into being,” the scarab became the emblem of Khepri and of creation, renewal, and existence itself.

What were scarabs made of?

Scarabs were made from a range of materials, most often glazed steatite colored a bright blue-green, but also green jasper, serpentine, carnelian, lapis lazuli, and molded faience. Green and blue-green were deliberately chosen as the colors of resurrection and new life.

Related Entries

Khepri, Ra, Atum, Bennu, Maat, Osiris, Anubis, Ba, Amun-Re, Ouroboros, Phoenix