Also called heart scarab, scarab beetle amulet, Khepri amulet
An ancient Egyptian amulet carved as a dung beetle, the creature of the sunrise god Khepri, worn for renewal and good fortune and, as the large heart scarab, laid on mummies to keep the heart from speaking against its owner at judgment.
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Take care: Do not buy unprovenanced ancient scarabs; the trade fuels looting and fakes are common. This is a modern devotional echo of Egyptian practice, not a recreation of funerary rites.
A large scarab of dark green or black stone was placed over the heart of the mummy, often inscribed with Book of the Dead spell 30B. The spell asks the heart not to stand as a witness against its owner when it is weighed against the feather of truth before Osiris.
Smaller scarabs had names, titles or designs on the base and served as working seals pressed into clay, as well as amulets. They were traded across the eastern Mediterranean and copied in the Levant and Phoenicia.
Amenhotep III issued large scarabs with long inscriptions announcing events such as his marriage to Queen Tiye and his lion hunts, sending them across his realm almost like news bulletins.
The scarab beetle lays its eggs in a ball of dung and rolls it along the ground. Egyptians saw in this the god Khepri, whose name relates to the verb to come into being, rolling the sun into the sky each dawn. The beetle became a sign of self-renewal and rebirth. Scarab amulets appear by the First Intermediate Period and became one of the most common Egyptian objects, made of steatite, faience, glass and semiprecious stone.
Heart scarabs were made for burial. Museums hold many inscribed with Book of the Dead spell 30B, such as the human-headed scarab at the Metropolitan Museum and a New Kingdom example at Johns Hopkins with ten lines of the spell. Because scarabs are small, durable and popular, they were traded and imitated across the Mediterranean, and they remain one of the most faked antiquities on the market.
The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for life, a cross with a loop at the top, carried by gods in art and worn by the living and buried with the dead as an amulet for health, safety and rebirth.
An ancient Egyptian symbol of the falcon god Horus's eye, torn out by Seth and restored by Thoth, worn as one of Egypt's most popular amulets for healing, wholeness and protection by the living and the dead.
Middle Kingdom Egyptians wrote the names of enemies and dangerous forces on red pots and clay figures, then smashed and buried them to bind those forces. The modern adaptation breaks a pot inscribed with a fear or a bad pattern, not a person.
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