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Egyptian Antiquities :
Masterpieces of Egyptian Art : Green Stone Heart Scarab of Nesptah, the Priest of Bastet
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Green Stone Heart Scarab of Nesptah, the Priest of Bastet - X.0134
Origin: Egypt
Circa: 1250
BC
to 1000
BC
Dimensions:
2.375" (6.0cm) high
x 1.75" (4.4cm) wide
Collection: Egyptian Antiquities
Style: New Kingdom
Medium: Stone
Location: Great Britain
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| Description |
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By far the most important amulet in Ancient
Egypt was the scarab, symbolically as sacred to
the Egyptians as the cross is to Christians. Based
upon the dung beetle, this sacred creature forms
a ball of dung around its semen and rolls it over
the sand, creating a larger ball. Eventually, the
scarab drops the excrement ball into its burrow
where the female lays her eggs on the ground
and covers them with the ball. In turn, the
larvae consume the ball and emerge in the
following days from the ground as if
miraculously reborn. In the life cycle of the
beetle, the Ancient Egyptians envisioned a
microcosm of the daily rebirth of the sun. They
imagined the ancient sun god Khepri was a great
scarab beetle rolling the sun across the heavens.
The scarab also became a symbol of the
enduring human soul as well, hence its frequent
appearance in funerary art.
Sculpted in a fine green stone, perhaps to be
identified as greywacke, and exhibiting a matte-
polished surface, this scarab is characterized by
fine linear details present on its top side which
articulate the component parts of its body. Of
particular note among these details is the
presence of a double line separating the thorax
from the elytra, or wing covering, and the
pendant triangles near its outer corners. These
pendant triangles are first encountered on
scarabs created during Dynasty XVIII and
continue in popularity into Dynasty XXVI of the
Late Period. The flat surface on the bottom of the
scarab provides a convenient surface for the
inscription in hieroglyphs which is divided into
twelve rows, the last row of which is, in fact,
inscribed, and this feature provides the dating
criterion for our scarab to the Late Period. Earlier
scarabs of this type contain a lesser number of
horizontal rows and generally avoid inscribing
the bottom-most register.
The inscriptions in hieroglyphs, derived from
spells preserved in Chapters 30 and 30B of the
so-called ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead,
permit one to identify this object as a heart
scarab, which played a fundamental role in the
aspired resurrection for the elite members of
Egyptian society. It was widely believed that the
heart was the seat of one’s conscience and, as
such, could reveal the true nature of an
individual’s character. It is for this reason that
the culminating ceremony in the Book of the
Dead was the last judgment in which the heart of
the deceased was weighted against the feather of
truth in order to determine whether the
deceased’s testimony was accurate. The heart
was believed to be an independent witness,
capable of contradicting the deceased’s
testimony. The prayer inscribed on our example
is an appeal to the heart not to bear witnesses
against the deceased. It may be translated, in
part, into English, as, “Oh my heart which I
obtained from my mother…do not bring up
anything against me in the presence of the great
god of the West…”
Our example is inscribed for an individual named
Nesptah, a very popular name during the Late
Period which may be translated into English as,
“The-one-who-belongs-to-the-god-Ptah-of-
Memphis.” Nesptah was a priest in the cult of
Bastet, the cat goddess, whose cult centre was in
the Delta city of Bubastis.
Daphna Ben-Tor, The Scarab (Jerusalem 1993),
pages 54-55, numbers 6-11.
See, Michel Malaise, Les scarabées de Coeur
dans l’Egypte ancienne (Brussels 1978), for a
concise study of these heart scarabs.
- (X.0134)
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