The beetle in jewellery, from scarab to Victorian brooch

The beetle is the oldest insect in jewellery by a wide margin, and for most of that history it was not decoration. An Egyptian scarab was a stamp seal with a bug's back on it, used to sign documents and seal jars. Three thousand years later the Victorians went the other way and used actual beetles, wings and all, sewn onto dresses and set into gold. Between those two points sits the reason beetles keep coming back: they are hard, symmetrical, shiny and shaped like something a jeweller would have invented anyway.

The scarab was a seal before it was an amulet

The model is Scarabaeus sacer, the dung beetle that rolls a ball of dung across the ground and buries it. Egyptian thought connected that to the sun being pushed across the sky, and to the god Khepri, whose name shares a root with the verb meaning to come into being. A beetle that appears to generate itself out of the ground is a good emblem for becoming.

What made the object useful was the underside. Scarabs are carved with a flat engraved base, usually in glazed steatite or in Egyptian faience, which is ground quartz with an alkaline glaze rather than clay. That base carried a name, a title or a motto, and it was pressed into clay or wax.

So the earliest mass produced scarabs, from the Middle Kingdom onward, were administrative. An official wore his seal, and the seal happened to be beetle shaped. The amulet and the office are the same object.

The heart scarab, and what was written on it

The funerary version is bigger and more specific. A heart scarab was laid on the chest of a mummy, often in green stone, and inscribed with a spell from the Book of the Dead addressed to the heart of the deceased. The text asks the heart not to speak against its owner at the weighing.

That is a very precise job. The heart was understood to be the seat of the person and would be weighed against a feather, so the scarab is an instruction to a specific organ at a specific moment. It is closer to a legal document than to an ornament.

Larger commemorative scarabs exist too, issued in series by the royal workshops to record a marriage, a lion hunt or the digging of a lake. Those are closer to coins or medals in function: published objects, distributed on purpose.

Scarabs travelled, and so did the forgeries

The form spread out of Egypt. Levantine and Hyksos period workshops made their own, Phoenician traders carried them, and Etruscan gem cutters produced carnelian scarabs with engraved bases in a completely different artistic language on the underside. Greek engraved gems borrow the shape as a convenient thing to hold.

Scarabs are also among the most heavily forged antiquities in existence. Nineteenth century Egypt supported a real industry making them for tourists, and the quality ranges from crude to genuinely difficult, so a scarab with no documented history is close to unprovable either way.

That is worth knowing before buying one described as ancient. The honest market price of an unprovenanced scarab is the price of a modern carving, because that is what the evidence supports.

Egyptian revival came in three waves

The first wave follows the French expedition of 1798 to 1801 and the enormous illustrated survey published afterwards, which put accurate Egyptian ornament into the hands of European designers for the first time. The second comes with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the removal of obelisks to Paris, London and New York in the decades after.

Victorian scarab jewellery belongs to that second wave: bracelets and brooches set with carved hardstone or faience scarabs, often strung in rows. A proportion of the scarabs in surviving Victorian pieces are genuinely ancient, bought loose in Egypt and remounted in gold at home, which is why museum collections hold Victorian bracelets full of real Middle Kingdom seals.

The third wave is 1922 and the tomb of Tutankhamun, and its output is Art Deco rather than Victorian. If a scarab piece has stepped geometry and hard colour contrasts, it is from the 1920s, not the 1870s.

The Victorians used actual beetles

Alongside the carved scarabs ran something less comfortable. From the 1860s, iridescent wing cases from jewel beetles of the genus Sternocera, collected in India and Burma, were sewn in their thousands onto net and muslin. Beetlewing embroidery covered evening dresses and shawls, and the most famous example is a gown made for a London stage Lady Macbeth in 1888, which is still exhibited.

Whole beetles were mounted too. Large Brazilian jewel beetles and weevils were set into gold brooches and sold as natural history jewellery, part of the same taste that produced hummingbird heads in earrings and butterflies under glass domes. Living beetles worn on a chain, which still happens in parts of Mexico with a species of Zopherus, are a continuation of the practice and a welfare problem.

We will say the obvious thing: we do not sell insects. A stag beetle cast in brass is a copy of a beetle, which is the version of this tradition that does not require anything to be collected.

The stag beetle took a different route

Northern Europe had its own beetle with a reputation, and it was not Egyptian. The stag beetle, Lucanus cervus, is the largest beetle in Britain and much of Europe, and German folk names connect it to fire and thunder, with a belief that it carried burning coals to thatched roofs.

It also got the best portrait any insect has ever had. A watercolour of a stag beetle painted in 1505 by Durer is one of the earliest independent studies of an insect in European art, and it fixed the way the animal is drawn: three quarter view, mandibles forward, legs splayed.

That pose is still the default. Draw a stag beetle today and you will probably draw the 1505 one, because every subsequent illustration has been copying it.

Why brass suits a beetle

Beetle colour is mostly structural rather than pigmented. The shine comes from layered cuticle that interferes with light, which is why a dead jewel beetle keeps its colour for a century and a dead butterfly does not. It also means the look cannot be reproduced with paint, only approximated with metal.

Casting likes beetles for mechanical reasons. An elytron is a smooth convex shell with no fine hair and no thin membrane, so it fills cleanly in a mould and polishes without losing detail. Legs and antennae are the hard part, which is why cheap castings have thick stumpy legs and good ones do not.

The same logic covers the rest of the insect shelf. A brass dragonfly is harder to cast well than a beetle because the wings want to be thin, and a brass cockroach is easier than either, which is a sentence we did not expect to write and stand by.

Questions people actually ask

What did the scarab beetle symbolise in ancient Egypt?

Coming into being and the daily rebirth of the sun, through the god Khepri. The beetle rolling a ball across the ground was read as the sun being pushed across the sky, and the word shares a root with the verb to become.

What is a heart scarab?

A large funerary scarab placed on the chest of a mummy and inscribed with a spell from the Book of the Dead. The text addresses the heart directly and asks it not to testify against its owner when it is weighed.

Did Victorians really wear real beetles?

Yes. Iridescent wing cases from Asian jewel beetles were sewn onto dresses and shawls from the 1860s, and whole mounted beetles were set into gold brooches, alongside butterflies under glass and birds in millinery.

Are most Egyptian scarabs for sale genuine?

Treat any scarab without documented history as unproven. Nineteenth century Egypt supported a large industry making them for tourists, and forgeries range from obvious to very good, so provenance is the only real test.