amuletsScarab𓆣

The scarab is the one Egyptian amulet that is also a signature. From the end of the First Intermediate Period, about 2055 BCE, it becomes extremely common, and it pushes aside the cylinder seal and the button seal with its geometric designs. In the Middle Kingdom, officials have their names and titles cut on the base and press them into clay: the same object that guards its wearer also signs his letters.

By the early Middle Kingdom, about 2000 BCE, the beetle shape is enormously popular, and it stays popular through the rest of the pharaonic period. Neighbours take it up. From the middle Bronze Age, other peoples of the Mediterranean and the Near East import Egyptian scarabs and cut their own in Egyptian or in local styles, most of all in the Levant. Canaanite engravers add cross-hatching, native animals and the palm branch. Phoenician engravers pick the shape up in the Achaemenid period, from the later sixth century BCE into the mid-fourth, and Tharros on Sardinia becomes a production centre; Greek and Phoenician merchants carry them to the Etruscans in the fifth century BCE, and the Etruscan scarab runs at Vulci and Tarquinia from the last decades of the sixth century BCE.

Dating one is harder than it looks. A scarab bearing a pharaoh's name is usually of his reign — but not always. Scarabs carrying Old Kingdom names like Khufu, Khafre and Unas were most probably made much later, in the Twenty-fifth or Twenty-sixth Dynasty, when the old kings were being imitated. The throne name of Thutmose III, Men Kheper Re, turns up in vast numbers, many of them centuries after him: the hieroglyphs themselves came to be treated as protective, and the carver may not have understood what he was reproducing. Inference — an amulet whose whole point is a name is the amulet most likely to be copied, which is why the scarab is both the best dating tool Egyptology has and one of its worst traps.

One scarab fixes a shipwreck. A golden scarab inscribed with the name of Queen Nefertiti was lifted from the Uluburun wreck off Turkey, among the luxury cargo, and its inscription gives a frame for when the ship went down.

Carved from steatite and fired hard, or moulded in faience and glazed blue or green. The base is cut with the inscription, the back drilled lengthways, and the thing strung on thread, hung from a necklace or mounted on a swivel ring. Ring mounts change over time: threads tied to the finger in the Old Kingdom, bezels in the Middle Kingdom, cast scarabs on gold wire in the New Kingdom. Most glazes have worn off, so a steatite scarab that reads white or brown in a museum tray was green or blue when it was made.

Three classes go with the dead rather than the living: heart scarabs, pectoral scarabs sewn onto the chest with a separate pair of outstretched wings from the Twenty-fifth Dynasty on, and naturalistic scarabs, 2 to 3 cm long, carved in the round with a suspension loop running crossways.

The shape outlived the practice. Scarabs are made now as jewellery and sold in Cairo, Luxor and the airport shops, and cut stone and faience versions turn up in every dealer's tray. Forgery is old: the Twenty-fifth Dynasty was already making scarabs with fourth-dynasty names on them, so a 'later copy' is a category inside the ancient material, not only a modern problem. As of 2026 no source read for this record puts a figure on how much of the market is modern.