เครื่องรางสคารับหัวใจHeart scarab

The spell on the base is an instruction to an organ. At the Weighing of the Heart the dead person's heart goes on one pan of the scales and a single feather from Ma'at's headdress on the other. A heart lighter than the feather lets its owner start the journey to Aaru; a heart heavy with wrongdoing tips off the pan into the jaws of Ammit, and the soul is left restless in the Duat. Chapter 30B commands the heart not to give evidence against its owner. The scarab is there to hold it to that, or to speak in its place.

That is why the heart, alone among the organs, stayed in the body. Egyptians held it to be the seat of the mind, so the embalmers took out the other viscera and preserved them separately and left the heart where it was — with the stone beetle on top of it.

The first known depictions are Sixteenth or Seventeenth Dynasty, about 1690 BCE, though the amulet was in use as early as the Eleventh Dynasty. Until the Eighteenth Dynasty it stayed close to Theban royalty; then it turns up in other people's burials. In the Twenty-first Dynasty it is an important piece of protection among the priesthood of Amun. After that it thins out of human burials and attaches to particular gods instead.

The object shrank. New Kingdom heart scarabs are large, four to five centimetres. By the Third Intermediate Period a smaller variant appears, two to four centimetres — and because it is small it is left uninscribed. These small ones are not laid over the wrappings but put inside the chest cavity, next to the real heart. Inference — a spell-bearing amulet that stops bearing its spell is a change worth naming: the shape is doing the work the words used to do.

The Book of the Dead specifies a stone it calls nmhf, nemehef. Nobody has identified it.

Cut from dark stone, inscribed on the base with Chapter 30B, set in a gold frame and hung at the neck on gold wire, or — in the smaller late form — put into the chest cavity beside the heart during mummification. Some were worked into pectorals, the rectangular chest ornaments laid on a mummy's breast.

Not made and not used; the practice ended with the religion that needed it. Heart scarabs sit in museum cases, and the Israel Museum and the British Museum both publish examples. As of 2026 what a reader is most likely to meet is a photograph of one, captioned with a spell about a heart being asked to keep quiet.