Why Was the Scarab Sacred in Ancient Egypt? Khepri and Rebirth

Khepri, the beetle god of the morning sun

In Egyptian religion, the sun god appeared in different forms through the day. Khepri was the morning sun, Ra the sun at its height, and Atum the evening sun. Khepri was usually shown as a scarab beetle holding up the sun disk, or as a man with a whole beetle in place of his head.

The link came from a simple observation. The sacred scarab, a black dung beetle common along the Nile, shapes dung into a ball and pushes it across the ground. Egyptians imagined a giant beetle pushing the sun the same way, up from the horizon at dawn and across the sky. In funerary texts that describe the sun’s nightly journey through the underworld, Khepri is the form in which the sun is reborn and leads it back into the morning sky.

Khepri had no large temple cult of his own. He was seen as an aspect of the sun god, but the beetle that stood for him became one of the most common sacred symbols in Egypt.

A beetle that seemed to create itself

The Egyptian name of the god is tied to the verb kheper, which meant “to come into being”, “to develop” or “to take form”. The scarab hieroglyph was used to write that word. Self-creation was a central idea in Egyptian thinking about the gods and the world, and the scarab seemed to act it out.

People could see beetles roll balls of dung into the ground and, weeks later, new beetles climbing out of the soil. They did not see the egg the female had hidden inside the ball, so the beetle seemed to make new life from nothing. Ancient writers repeated this idea: the Greek author Plutarch, for example, claimed that all scarabs were male and fathered their young by placing seed in a ball of dung. The belief was wrong, but it fitted the beetle’s role as a symbol of a god who brought himself into being.

Rebirth and the afterlife

The scarab’s life cycle also echoed Egyptian ideas about death. The larva grows hidden underground in a sealed chamber, turns into a pale, motionless pupa, and finally breaks out as a new adult. Some modern scholars have pointed out that the pupa, with its legs and wings pressed tightly against its body, looks rather like a wrapped mummy, though we do not know whether the Egyptians made that comparison.

For people who hoped to be reborn after death like the sun each morning, the scarab was a natural symbol of hope. Real scarab beetles were sometimes buried in graves, and from the New Kingdom onward, carved scarabs became a standard part of burial equipment.

Scarab amulets and seals

Scarab-shaped objects were made in enormous numbers. They became very popular by the Middle Kingdom, around 2000 BC, and remained in use for well over a thousand years. Most were small, often 1–2 cm (0.4–0.8 in) long, carved from soft stone such as steatite or molded from faience, a glazed ceramic, and usually glazed blue or green.

Heart scarabs were linked to the judgment of the dead, when the heart was weighed. Their inscription, usually spell 30B of the Book of the Dead, asked the heart not to testify against its owner. Pharaoh Amenhotep III had large scarabs made to announce events such as his marriage to Queen Tiye, and more than 200 of them survive. Scarabs were traded and copied across the eastern Mediterranean, so they turn up in excavations far from Egypt.

Which beetle was the Egyptian scarab?

The scarab of Egyptian art is usually identified as Scarabaeus sacer, a robust black ball-rolling dung beetle about 1.9–4 cm (0.7–1.6 in) long that still lives in Egypt and around the Mediterranean. The six blunt teeth on the front of its head, combined with the toothed front legs, form a ray-like arc, which some authors have compared to the rays of the sun. Egyptians probably did not distinguish it from other similar ball rollers in the region, and some scarab carvings show features of other species.

The real biology behind the symbol

Modern science has kept some of the Egyptian picture and corrected the rest:

• Scarabs really do roll dung balls, often bigger than themselves, and then bury them. See why dung beetles roll balls.
• Young beetles really do emerge from the earth, but from eggs laid by females inside buried brood balls.
• Ball-rolling beetles really do depend on the sun: they use it, and the pattern of polarized light around it, as a compass to roll in straight lines, as explained in how dung beetles navigate.

In a sense, the Egyptians were closer to the truth than they knew. A beetle that steers its ball by the sun makes a fitting emblem of a god who moved the sun across the sky.