protective · from c. 1700 BCE
The Heart Scarab
A stone beetle laid over the heart, inscribed with an instruction to that heart: do not testify against me.
What the sources claim for it
Silence bought from a witness. The scarab is insurance against the one testimony the deceased cannot control.
History
Where does the Heart Scarab come from?
Ordinary scarabs are everywhere in Egypt — seals, gifts, commemoratives — and take their sense from the dung beetle rolling its ball, read as the sun pushed up over the horizon each morning, and so as self-renewal. The heart scarab is a specific and much more legally-minded object: large, usually green stone, bound in over the heart of the mummified body.
What it carries is Book of the Dead spell 30B, addressed to the deceased's own heart at the weighing before Osiris — do not stand up as a witness against me, do not oppose me before the keeper of the balance. The heart is the organ that will be weighed against the feather of Ma'at, and the amulet exists because the heart was understood to be capable of telling the truth at the worst possible moment.
4 figures
Who is it attached to?
Figures who carry it
An attribute rather than a signature — held, worn or associated in the texts and the images.
Figures it is used against
The mark is aimed at them. A ward names its target, which makes these the sharpest attributions on the page.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
The general scarab became a mass-market souvenir and jewellery form from the nineteenth century on; the heart scarab's legal function is almost never carried over with the shape.
Which texts describe it?
Oldest first, with what each one does with the mark. A mark described in a Bronze Age incantation and a mark first drawn in a seventeenth-century manuscript are different kinds of claim, whatever the shape has in common.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Anonymous; tr. E. A. Wallis Budge · c. 1550 BCE onward · Egyptian
Spell 30B is written on the scarab and addressed to the heart itself.
Read The Egyptian Book of the Dead in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Hunefer · Wikimedia file page
Egyptian Amulets & Domestic Objects
Anonymous; recovered from settlements and burials · c. 2000 BCE onward · Material evidence
Standard in élite burials from the Second Intermediate Period onward.
Read Egyptian Amulets & Domestic Objects in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Roland Unger · Wikimedia file page
Nearby
Related marks
The Ankh
The sign for 'life', held to the nose of a king by a god. Not an amulet first — a hieroglyph that got carried into three dimensions.
The Djed Pillar
A four-tiered column meaning stability, later read as the backbone of Osiris and raised upright at festival as a resurrection.
The Was Sceptre
A straight staff with a forked foot and an animal head — and the animal, on the best reading, is Set's.
The Uraeus
A cobra rearing at the front of a crown, understood as the eye of the sun placed where it can spit at whatever approaches the wearer's face.
The Wedjat Eye
The eye Set tore out and Thoth made whole. Wedjat means 'the sound one' — the amulet is named for the repair, not the injury.
The Winged Disc
A sun with wings, borrowed by every empire in the region in turn — and the direct ancestor of the Persian faravahar.