Worship

As with many related cosmic deities, Khepri was not accorded a cult of his own, though examples of colossal stone statues of the beetle god (such as the example now preserved beside the sacred lake in the temple of Amun at Karnak) suggest that the god was honoured in many Egyptian temples and might have represented the concepts of creation and the ongoing solar journey w'hich were symbolically incorporated into temple architecture. On a much smaller scale, scarab beetle amulets are known from the 5th dynast>i, and scarabs used as seals appear in the First Intermediate Period and were produced in great numbers from Middle Kingdom times onward. The undersides of these scarabs were incised with the owner’s names and titles, with the names of deities or kings used for their protective value, or simply with decorative designs. Egyptian kings even used the undersides of scarabs as a medium for the recording of victories and other important events, with those of Amenophis III recording events as varied as the king’s lion hunting

Expeditions and the arrival of a new princess for his harem. Other types of scarabs included ‘heart scarabs’ placed on the mummy of the deceased and scaraboids which fused the basic form of the scarab with the image of some other creature. I'he scarab was, in fact, the most popular of Egyptian amulets, and while Khepri may not have enjoyed the widespread services of a formal cult, his utilization as a potent symbol of creation and resurrection made him an almost ubiquitous deity in ancient Egyptian culture.