If you have seen the film The Mummy you will know what a scarab beetle looks like. You will easily recognise the shape of this insect in hieroglyphs and amulets, and you might wonder why the ancient Egyptians worshipped such a strange creature. Let me reassure you, the real scarab beetle is nothing at all like the flesh-eating monsters created by Hollywood.

The habits of the common dung beetle, scarabaeus sacer, were closely observed by the Egyptians. The beetle collects a small pellet of animal dung and pushes it round and round, rolling it into a dung ball, in the same way that you might make a large snowball in winter time. The scarab lays its eggs in this dung ball and rolls it around wherever it goes to keep it safe, before finally burying it to allow the eggs to incubate underground. The dung then serves as a source of food for the newly hatched scarabs and, when they are big enough, the little beetles push their way to the surface.

The Egyptians saw this as one possible explanation of how the sun travelled across the sky. They imagined a giant scarab beetle rolling the sun along like an enormous dung ball. At sunset the scarab would bury the sun in the western horizon. During the night a new beetle would hatch out ready to push the sun up through the eastern horizon at dawn. This cosmic beetle was known as Khepri, the god of the rising sun. In the beautifully decorated tomb of Queen Nefertari, Khepri is shown as a man whose head has been replaced by a scarab beetle. His name has several meanings including “to exist”, “to become” and “to be transformed”, as well as “form”, “shape” or “renewal”. As a hieroglyph, the scarab beetle appears in many royal names, for example Kha-kheper-Ra (Senusert II), Men-kheper-Ra (Thutmose III) and, of course, Neb-kheperu-Ra (Tutankhamun). Tutankhamun’s official name may be translated as “All the Forms of Ra” and was an important statement stressing the King’s relationship to the great sun god Ra. Every king claimed to be the Son of Ra.

Some of the most spectacular jewels from royal tombs include scarabs carved from many types of coloured stone, worked in gold or moulded in the glazed material we commonly call faience. Bracelets, armlets, pendants and necklaces from Tutankhamun’s tomb alone have scarabs made from deep blue lapis lazuli, green volcanic glass, pale blue turquoise and grey-green steatite. Like most beetles, the scarab can fly and the Egyptian artist often showed the beetle with outspread wings; but, if you look carefully, you will see that these wings are shown with feathers – they are a bird’s wings not an insect’s. This is another example of the links between the different forms of the sun god, who was most often represented as a hawk or a hawk-headed man. It was a way of explaining how the scarab Khepri could lift the sun into the sky. The feathers of the scarab’s wings are often multicoloured, inlaid with glass or semi-precious stones (see page 34).

The oval shape of the beetle made it ideal for use as a seal stone. The name of its owner could be carved on the flat underside and, when pressed into damp clay, the name was “printed”. The scarab seal was usually pierced with a hole from nose to tail so that it could be threaded on to a cord to be worn around the neck. If the cord was replaced by a wire, the scarab was transformed into a simple ring. Elaborate and costly rings were made by fixing a scarab, carved from stone or made of faience, into a gold setting.

Large versions of the scarab seal were used to commemorate special occasions. Amenhotep III issued several scarabs recording important events such as his marriage, a wild cattle hunt and the building of a pleasure lake on which he sailed his royal barge. These were sent to some of the King’s noble friends and to the governors of cities or provinces throughout Egypt to tell them the news of his achievements.

The most important scarab that any Egyptian was likely to own was the heart scarab. This large amulet was traditionally carved from a type of jade called nephrite, or another green stone, with a gold surround. It was placed in the mummy wrappings over the heart, which it was meant to protect. The Egyptians did not understand the importance of the human brain. They believed the heart controlled the body and that all a person’s thoughts and feelings, intelligence and memories were kept in the heart. In fact, the Egyptians thought that the heart contained everything that made a person an individual. They also believed that the heart kept a perfect record of everything its owner had said or done, and that it would provide evidence for how good or bad that person had been in his lifetime, when the heart was weighed against the feather of Maat in the Hall of Judgement.

The heart scarab was carved with an inscription from the Book of the Dead:

“O my heart which I had from my mother! O my heart which has been with me all my life! Do not oppose me in the tribunal; do not be hostile to me before the Keeper of the Scales; do not tell lies concerning what I have done; do not give evidence against me before the Great God, Lord of the West.For you are my ka which was in my body, the protector who made me whole.”

The heart scarab was usually the largest amulet included in a mummy and shows up clearly in X-ray photographs. Because it was always put in the same place, and because it was made of valuable materials, tomb robbers often cut a hole through the bandages in the centre of the chest to find it, but this does not mean that the scarab beetle chewed its way out! You can see lots of scarabs in these books, both by Carol Andrews: Amulets of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Egyptian Jewellery.