Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

Who could be so dull as not to see in this sphere, full of the seeds of life, a perfect symbol of this terrestrial globe, formed by creative wisdom and energy, and everywhere fraught with the quickening germs of endlessly manifold being? And so the beetle became the symbol of the Creator.

But when the symbol of the Creator, with his burden, the symbol of the life-containing globe, had arrived at the edge of the desert, it there excavated a gallery a foot or two deep—a catacomb, a grave—into which it descended. What divine forethought in thus foreseeing the effects of the damp, and of the inundation! and these primæval observers had not extinguished thought on these subjects by labelling such acts as instincts, and then putting them away on a shelf of the mind. This work, also, of the insect did not escape them. It had, as it seemed, buried itself. It thus, at all events, sanctioned their mode of burial: though, perhaps, it had previously taught them where, and how, to bury—in the dry desert, in excavated galleries. It was in this way the young world learnt. What they thought was what they had seen.

But there was another lesson, or rather series of lessons, which, through its wondrous transformations, this beetle taught the old Egyptians. To begin at the beginning: the first period of its existence it passed in a drear subterranean abode, with feeble senses, narrowly circumscribed powers, unloved and unloving, ungladdened by pleasant sights, only terrified by the unintelligible voices that at times reached it from the sun-lit world above; its best pleasure to eat dirt; its only employment to grow into fitness for future changes.

Having dragged out the time apportioned to that first base condition, it was translated into the second. Nature’s hand swathed it into a chrysalis. Movement now ceased. Food could no longer be taken. The avenues of the senses were closed. The functions of life were put in abeyance. But life itself was not extinguished; it was only suspended while new transformations were being effected to qualify the insect for its perfected existence.

At last, when all was completed, from the swathed-up chrysalis burst forth a marvellously furnished body. What had painfully crawled in the earth, now spurned the earth, and flew to and fro, at its will, in the air. It had passed into another and totally different stage of being; and, too, into a new world where life was bright and free. And, besides, it was now full of Divine sagacity, such as became its new life.

All this was nature’s triptych in illustration of the three stages of man’s being. The earth-born, dirt-fed grub represented the first, the earthly stage, during which man is the slave of toil and suffering, the victim of grovelling cares, the sport of ever-recurring accidents—a knot of troubles and incapacities, in which, however, are concealed the precious germs of eventual glory and blessedness.

The chrysalis was an explanation, which he that ran might read, of the conditions and purpose of the mummy period, that middle stage, without cares, or wants, or enjoyments; the long undreaming sleep, during which the incapacities of the first stage are transforming themselves into the capacities and powers of the last. It was so with the chrysalis: and they believed, and taught, that it would be so with the mummy, the first stage of whose course was now closed; and for that reason it was that they embalmed his body into a human chrysalis.

The winged insect bursting from the cerements of its suspended, into the happy freedom of its new aërial life, was a type, addressed by nature to the eye, and through the eye to the understanding, to prefigure the soul of man, at last emancipated from all earthly and fleshly hindrances, soaring to the empyrean regions of eternal day, for the full enjoyment of its predestined glory, for which—all that had gone before having been the long and troublous discipline—it is now completely equipped. In that last transformation from the chrysalis to the winged insect was an assurance in nature’s handwriting of the resurrection from the mummy condition, in a higher form, and with enlarged endowments.

What volumes of profoundest doctrine, what revelations in this little beetle! For thought was not yet ossified, as in after times, into those rigid forms, with which neither history nor our own experience is unfamiliar, and which oblige men to reject obstinately, and to denounce loudly, everything that does not support the existing settled system; but was still growing vigorously, and assimilating freely what it fed on: and so the eye and heart were still open to the lessons of nature.

The reason, then, why in modern Egypt you give an Arab boy no more than a piastre, or two, for an antique scarab, is that when men began to observe and think, six thousand, perhaps twice six thousand years ago, the Egyptian beetle taught the Egyptians much. Therein was the reason why they loved to have the stones of their rings and seals cut into the form of this beetle. For this reason it was that they used it for amulets: there was much of the divinity in it. This was why it became a favourite object for bearing an inscription that was to commemorate a royal hunt, or a royal marriage. Probably a scarab, with an inscribed record of the event, was sent to all who had been present on the occasion. There are such now in our British Museum. It was for these reasons that the scarab with expanded wings was laid on the mummy. And I can imagine their having been used in many other ways, as New Year’s gifts, as wedding presents, as mourning rings, such as were customary here a generation or two back; as tickets of admission to festivals and funeral processions, and even as tokens of membership in sacred guilds and other associations, each bearing its appropriate inscription, containing, of course, the name of some God; for that was a sanction that was sought for everything that was done in Egypt.