The scarab and Khepri, the sun reborn every morning

One of the most widespread amulets of ancient Egypt depicts a humble insect: the dung beetle, which forms balls of dung and pushes them along the ground. The Egyptians saw in that action an image of the movement of the sun and linked it to the god Khepri. From this observation arose a symbol that was carved on an enormous number of seals, placed over the hearts of the dead and spread by merchants throughout the Mediterranean.

The god who comes into being

The name Khepri derives from the verb kheper, meaning «to come into being», «to transform», and the hieroglyphic sign of the scarab itself was used to write this word. Khepri was the morning sun, emerging from the horizon, while Ra represented the midday sun and Atum the evening sun. In the tombs of the Valley of the Kings the scarab is often painted pushing the solar disc out of the darkness.

The image combined two observations. The beetle rolling its ball recalled the sun pushed across the sky; and from the dung heaps in which the insect lays its eggs the young beetles emerged, as if born of themselves. Some ancient authors, including Horapollo in his Hieroglyphica, even believed that there were no female scarabs, an idea that strengthened the association with divine self-generation.

The heart scarab

In funerary religion the scarab took on a special role. A stone scarab, often green or dark, inscribed with chapter 30B of the Book of the Dead, was placed on the chest of the mummy. The text addresses the heart of the deceased and asks it not to testify against him during the weighing before Osiris, when the heart was placed on a balance against the feather of Maat.

For the Egyptians the heart was the seat of thought and memory, and for this reason it remained in the body during mummification while other organs were removed. The heart scarab was therefore a symbolic guarantee of continuity between earthly life and the judgement. Refined examples with gold mounts have been found in royal burials, while simpler ones were within reach of a much wider public.

Seals, commemorations and diffusion

From the Middle Kingdom the scarab became the most common form of seal: the flat underside bore names, titles, decorative motifs or short wishes of good fortune. Amenhotep III, in the fourteenth century BC, had large commemorative scarabs produced that announced events of his reign, such as his marriage to Queen Tiye, his hunts of lions and wild bulls, or the digging of a lake for his wife.

These objects travelled far. Egyptian scarabs and local imitations have been found in Palestine, Cyprus, Phoenicia, Carthage, Sardinia and Etruria, where an independent art of scarab-shaped gems with Greek mythological scenes developed. In the temple of Karnak, beside the sacred lake, there still stands a great granite scarab dedicated by Amenhotep III to the sun god.

The scarab remains one of the most recognisable Egyptian symbols precisely because it combined an everyday observation with a profound theological idea. An insect that anyone could see at work in the fields became the image of the continuous transformation of the world: every morning, like Khepri, the sun was born again, and with it the hope that the dead too might be renewed.