Scarab Beetle

A dung beetle cuts a ball from a pat, rolls it backwards with its hind legs, buries it, and lays an egg inside. Weeks later a beetle emerges from the ball. To an Egyptian observer that is two facts: something round is moved across the ground by an unseen effort, and life comes out of matter with no visible parent.

Both were used. Khepri is the god of the morning sun, shown as a beetle or as a man with a beetle for a head, and his name is formed on the verb kheper, to come into being. The sun at dawn is the ball being pushed up over the horizon, and the sun's daily return is the same self-generation the beetle appeared to perform. Ra has three forms across the day and Khepri is the first of them.

The biology is wrong, which does not matter to the result. Beetles do not generate from dung; the egg is laid in it. The misreading is exactly the kind of careful, mistaken empiricism that produces durable religious images, and it produced one of the most durable anyone has made.

The name and the verb are worth noticing together. Egyptian did not need a separate word for what the beetle does and what existence does. The scarab is not a symbol of becoming; it is the hieroglyph that writes it.

The scarab is the most common amulet form in Egypt across three thousand years, in faience, steatite, carnelian and glass, worn in life, given as a gift, and used as a seal with an inscription cut into the flat underside. Commemorative scarabs of Amenhotep III were issued to announce a marriage and a lion hunt, which makes them something close to a state press release.

The heart scarab is a specific and stranger object. A large scarab, usually of dark stone, was placed over the heart of the mummy and inscribed with a version of spell 30B of the Book of the Dead. The spell addresses the heart directly and asks it not to stand up as a witness against its owner in the hall of judgement, not to make an opposing statement, and not to tell the keeper of the balance anything that would weigh against him.

That is a remarkable thing to write on a funerary object. The heart was understood as the seat of thought and memory and as the organ actually weighed against the feather of Maat, and the spell is a request that a person's own memory keep quiet at the trial. It assumes that a truthful heart might convict its owner, and it proceeds anyway.

Winged scarab pectorals extend the image, placing the beetle at the centre with outstretched wings and sometimes the sun disc above, so that the object worn on the chest of a dead person shows the sun coming up.