สายความเชื่องานเครื่องรางอียิปต์โบราณEgyptian amulet craft𓋹𓊽𓎬

Egypt's amulets come in two economies and the same workshops served both.

The living wore them strung at the neck. The dead were wrapped in them, by rule. What went where was not a matter of taste: the funerary texts say which amulet goes on which part of the body, which stone it should be cut from, and what is to be recited over it. Chapter 156 of the Book of the Dead asks for a tyet of red jasper at the mummy's neck. Chapter 30B goes on a heart scarab laid over the heart. A gold djed at the neck comes with a spell that promises the mummy the use of its spine back. That is an unusual thing for an amulet tradition to have: a manual.

The material made the scale possible. Faience is cheap, mouldable and does not rot, so a single mould turns out eyes and beetles and ankhs by the tray, and three thousand years later they are all still there. Inference — that is also the tradition's largest distortion. The reed, cloth, dough and wax charms that stood beside the faience ones are gone; what survives is what survives, and a museum drawer is a record of durability, not a census of what Egypt wore.

The shapes are hieroglyphs. An amulet cut in the form of a sign was meant to hand its wearer the quality the sign wrote: life for the ankh, stability for the djed, soundness for the wedjat, protection for the sa that Taweret holds. Composites run several signs together — ankh and was and djed, 'life, dominion and stability' — and were worn more often than the ankh on its own.

Not all of it was writing. Bes and Taweret are household gods with faces and bodies, moulded onto baby bottles, chairs, headrests and jars, and worn on the thigh as tattoos. The cippi are slabs you rinse and drink from. The scarab was an office seal as well as a charm.

The practice ended with the religion that needed it. Nothing in Egypt is now made to do what Chapter 156 describes. The shapes went on: the ankh survived into Coptic Christianity as the crux ansata, the wedjat into a worldwide jewellery trade, and Bes and Taweret into museum cases and fiction.

Moulded in faience or cut from stone — carnelian, lapis, green jasper, steatite fired hard — then pierced and strung, or set in gold. For the dead, placed by the embalmers at the position the funerary text specifies, with the spell recited over it. For the living, worn at the neck or the wrist, or set on a swivel ring.

Archaeological. The tradition is studied rather than practised, and the objects are concentrated in a handful of museums: the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian galleries, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Flinders Petrie's excavation and sorting of amulets into classes is still the framework museums label by. The modern trade in Egyptian-shaped jewellery, sold in Cairo, Luxor and the airports and worn worldwide, is a separate thing and is described on the object records rather than here.