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Beetles and humans

without any obvious immature stages. The

connection between an adult beetle seemingly

emerging from waste and taking flight with rebirth

after death is intuitive, and carved scarab amulets

are one of the most common surviving artifacts

from most periods of ancient Egypt, dating back

to the Bronze Age.

The dung beetle most commonly represented

in ancient Egyptian art is the Sacred Scarab

Scarabaeus sacer (Scarabaeidae), named because

of this association, but several other genera and

species are depicted, including members of the

genus Catharsius, the single-horned Copris, and the

African genus Kheper, whose name is a variant of

the name of the god. Clay models of the genus

MYTHOLOGY

Although beetles and other insects feature widely

in the folklore of many parts of the world, the

dung beetle is one of the only insects to have been

elevated to the status of a god! The scarab-headed

god Khepri was one of the manifestations of the

chief god Ra in the ancient Egyptian pantheon,

and was responsible for the morning sun. The

ancient Egyptians, a largely pastoral people,

would have watched the behavior of scarab dung

beetles while out tending their herds, and the dung

beetle rolling its ball of animal dung across the

pasture became a metaphor for the sun god rolling

the flaming ball of the sun across the sky. Khepri

is usually shown with a whole scarab beetle for a

head; he was also the god of renewal and rebirth,

because he was believed to have been formed from

“nothing,” just as the adult dung beetles appear

to hatch perfectly formed from their dung balls,

below | A vast Egyptian scarab beetle statue, six thousand

years old. Carved from a single block of diorite, it is

thought to represent the god Khepri.