This winged scarab amulet is made of three pieces of faience: the scarab body and the two wings. The scarab is detailed with the division of the wing cases (elytra) and the fan-shaped area (clypeus) at the front of the head. The wings are scored with lines that represent feathers on their trailing edges. Each piece is pierced multiple times to allow it to be sewn to the wrappings of a mummy. This example, like many others, has bright blue glaze, a reference to the color and the regenerative power of the sky (see cat. 41 for a shabti with glaze of the same color). This style of winged scarab amulet made of three pieces was very common in the Third Intermediate and Late Periods. Although the means of manufacture of this example is unclear, it closely resembles others that were created by rolling faience out on a piece of fabric and then cutting it into its final shape. This amulet could also have been molded.^[1]1

The scarab beetle represented the reborn (morning) sun, and by extension, the eternal rebirth of the deceased. The hieroglyph kheper, meaning “to come into being” or “to exist,” also takes the form of the scarab beetle: 𓆣. The scarab was therefore a particularly common form of funerary amulet that was often placed on the chest of a mummified person (for other examples of scarabs in burials, see cats. 99, 105). The winged version was a potent reminder of the transit of the sun from the eastern horizon across the vault of the sky. The Egyptians were very literal in their thinking; they conceptualized celestial phenomena through observation of their environment. When they observed the beetle rolling a ball of dung to its nest, they thought that the young emerged from that ball, thus understanding the scarab as an example of birth from an orb. They equated that image with the daily rebirth of the sun, which in turn was re-imagined as being pushed, like a ball of dung, across the sky by a great, winged scarab.2

Additional View of Cat. 91

For more on amulets, see About Amulets.3

Provenance

Émile Brugsch (1842–1930), Bulaq Museum and Egyptian Antiquities Service, Cairo; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1892.4

Publication History

Roberta Casagrande-Kim, ed., When the Greeks Ruled Egypt: From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, with contributions by Mary C. Greuel et al., exh. cat. (New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 2014), 103, no. 115.
5