In Egypt, it has been universally believed from all antiquity—and I think quite rightly—that after the scarab has laid an egg in the ball, the parents unite in rolling it to a place of safety, above the level of the annual inundation due to the rise of the Nile. At any rate, scarabs abound in Egypt. At a very early date, it would seem, the curious action of these beetles attracted the attention of the ancient Egyptians, whose worship of animals was one of the most marked features in their monstrous religion. Hence grew a strange and widespread superstition. A race which deified the hawk, the cat, the ibis, and the jackal was not likely to overlook the marvellous proceedings of the pious and dutiful scarab. So the very early Egyptians, we may conjecture, began by thinking there must be something divine in the nature of an insect which worked so ceaselessly on behalf of its young, and rolled such big round balls behind it up such relatively large hillocks. Watching a little closer, as time went on, the Egyptian discovered, no doubt, that sacred beetles did not proceed directly from sacred beetles, like lambs from ewes, but grew, as it were, out of the dirt and corruption of the mysterious pellets. A modern observer would, of course, at once suspect that the scarab laid an egg inside the ball, and would promptly proceed to pull one open and look for it. But that cold scientific method was not likely to commend itself to the mystic and deeply religious Egyptian mind. The priests by the Nile jumped rather to the conclusion that the scarab collected dirt in order to make a future scarab out of clay, and that from this dirt the young beetle grew, self-existent, self-developed, self-created. Considering the absence of scientific knowledge and comparative groups of scientific facts at the time, such a conclusion was by no means unnatural.
Once started on so strange a set of ideas, the Egyptians proceeded to evolve a worship of the scarab which grew ever and developed, as they thought the scarab itself did, practically out of nothing. The immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body were the central ideas of Egyptian religion; the thinkers of Thebes and Memphis instantly perceived a fanciful analogy between the scarab rising from its bed of dirt and the mummy reviving when the expected day of resurrection should at last arrive. As a consequence of this analogy, the scarab was made sacred: it was reverenced during its life and often preserved after its death, like the mummied cats and hawks and sacred Apis bulls which formed such special objects of veneration to the devout of Egypt. All sorts of mystic relations were also discovered before long in the scarab: its "toes" were counted as thirty, and held to symbolize the days of the month: it was said to be male only, without a female, and so to typify the creative power and the paternal or masculine principle in nature. Sun-worship, as we know, formed a large part of the later (though not of the most primitive) Egyptian religion: and the ball rolled by the scarab was therefore supposed to personify Ra, the great sun-god. In one way or another, the sanctity and the mystic implications of the scarab grew and grew, age after age, until at last scarab-worship became one of the chief practical elements in the religion of Egypt. There was a scarab-headed god, and scarab hieroglyphs appear on the face of all the monuments.
It is as a charm or amulet, however, that the ancient Egyptian imitation scarab is best known. From a very early period in the history of the Nile valley it became usual for luck's sake to bury some of these sacred beetles with the mummy, perhaps alive (in which case most of them would no doubt creep out again) and perhaps also dead. A few real scarabs have thus been found here and there in tombs. But for the most part, just as the Egyptians buried little porcelain images to accompany the mummy, so they buried porcelain or stone scarabs; and these were rather closely imitated from the living insect, but made still more sacred by being enamelled or engraved with the holy name of some king or god. Scarabs of this kind, inscribed with sacred words, and regarded as talismans, form some of the commonest objects disinterred in all the Egyptian excavations: one of them, from a specimen in the British Museum, is illustrated in No. 7. Comparison with the live beetles in the other engravings will show how well the Egyptians copied nature in this instance.
7.—AN EGYPTIAN SACRED SCARAB, IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
These beautiful and often costly Egyptian scarabs have been made the subject of very exhaustive study by various writers, more particularly by Mr. Loftie and Mr. Flinders Petrie. The Egyptians did not coin money, so that scarabs bearing the names of kings came to have somewhat the same importance for Egyptian history as coins have for the history of later civilized nations. Mr. Loftie traces the origin of the inscribed scarabs to a very early epoch in the Egyptian annals. "From the earliest times until the end of the native monarchy," he says, "certain usages continued unchanged. Among them was the inscription of names and texts on scarabs. The beetle which rolls before it"—he ought rather to have said behind it—"a ball of mud in which its egg is concealed was, at some period so remote that we cannot even approximately date it, seized upon as the embodiment of the idea of futurity.... The scarab, burying his egg, became the symbol of the resurrection, of the happy time to come, of a re-creation of all things; and with every corpse scarabs were buried, and scarabs were sewed upon the shroud, and strung into a network to cover the body, and suspended round the neck, and clasped in the dead hands. As many as three thousand scarabs have been found in one tomb, and the number in existence in museums and private collections is past count." Some of these imitation beetles are of blue pottery, enamelled outside; but others are of lapis lazuli, jade, carnelian, and many other precious stones. Sacred in themselves by their very form, that of the revered insect god, they are rendered still more sacred by their mystic inscriptions, which consist of appropriate religious phrases in hieroglyphic writing.
From Egypt, the belief in the luck and value of engraved scarabs as charms or amulets passed on to the Greeks, and also to the Etruscans. Many Greek scarabs have been found; and in the old Etruscan tombs such lucky beasts are comparatively common. They are mostly made more or less in imitation of the Egyptian originals. Oddly enough, even the early Christians themselves did not at once get over the belief in the sanctity and talismanic character of the sacred beetle, for the Rev. W. J. Loftie has pointed out examples of late scarabs engraved with undoubted Christian symbols—not only crosses but even crucifixes. In our own days, a slight revival of the antique superstition has once more taken place, and some ladies of my acquaintance wear specimens of the old sacred beetles as charms in brooches or suspended on their watch-chains.
Though such numbers of true ancient scarabs have been unearthed in Egypt, still the supply of the genuine article does not quite keep pace with the increasing demands of the modern tourist: and there is now a flourishing manufactory of sham antiques at Luxor, where hundreds of false scarabs with nice imitation hieroglyphic inscriptions are neatly turned out for the market every season.
About sixty different kinds of live scarabs are known to inhabit the Mediterranean district in Europe, Asia, or Africa: and four of these kinds can be easily distinguished as being individually represented in the old Egyptian gems. We have no true scarab of this class living in Britain: but there are other scavenger beetles which take their place, the best known being the common dorbeetle. One of the same family, but with a quaintly horned head, exists in vast numbers on the Surrey hills where I have pitched my tent. The English dung-beetle burrows in the soft sandstone, and throws up neat little heaps of clean sand at the mouth of its hole, like miniature molehills. Still, our English scavenger beetles—known to science as Geotrupes—are not nearly so clever or so interesting as the southern type, for the female in our sort merely grubs a straight tunnel in the ground, and lays her egg in a loose mass of dung, which she drags to the bottom in a shapeless condition. This beetle utters a plaintive buzzing cry when it is chasing its mate—a soft of "last appeal" which seems calculated to soften the heart of the hardest lady beetle. It is as cunning in its way as most others of its race, for if you catch it in your hand, it at once draws in its legs to its side and "shams dead." All the English and foreign scavenger beetles perform a useful task by following up animals and clearing away their refuse; indeed, a special kind of beetle lays itself out as scavenger for each species of large animal, one kind being attached to the cow, one to the donkey, one to the camel, and so on through a long list of patrons and satellites.
You will thus see that in this wider sense all creation moved together like a vast joint-stock co-operative society, each kind working consciously for its own good alone, but each also in a certain deeper and unconscious way contributing to the general well-being of all, by its exercise of some special function. Nevertheless, the function is always performed by each plant or animal itself for its own purposes; it only incidentally serves to benefit the others. Thus the burying beetles and the scavenger beetles work first of all and ostensibly for their own food and the food of their offspring: it is merely as an incidental result, undesigned by themselves, that they assist in purifying the air and the soil for all other species. Or, to put it still more simply, while these industrious little creatures are working individually for their own ends, they are also in the wider scheme of nature working unconsciously and almost unwillingly in the service of others. Nature bribes each kind, as it were, by some personal advantage to perform good work for the benefit of the totality.