As well as using material and enhancing it with motifs, past makers created forms from material, working the entire surface, on every scale from colossal sculpture to small items worn as jewelry for aesthetic effect and for protection. It may not be clear where the past maker and wearer placed emphasis between aesthetic and protective, though today different terms are used for these as two primary functions: when archaeologists, art historians, or curators consider the protective aspect dominant, the item may be a pendant; when they see more a protective aspect, the terms amulet and talisman are used. When jewelry is found on excavation, archaeologists may distinguish between beads (no precise motif identifiable) and amulets (identifiable motif) and then introduce labels for types and subtypes, to sort larger masses of material for further study. However, any item strung to be worn might have held intense significance for the maker and wearer, whether or not we can now interpret its material and form. In mass production and emulations of motifs, a figurative design may become so schematic that it is no longer clear even at production, further blurring the boundary between these categories. In the archaeology of Egypt, the first attempt at a detailed numerical typology of strung items would combine in one sequence what would later be separated into beads and amulets in one numerical sequence (Engelbach 1923, pl.49-54).
Both ancient writings (see Writings for good health) and twentieth-century ethnography confirm the parallel potential significance of beads as amulets. The Birzeit Museum at Ramallah in Palestine preserves an ethnographic collection of all material means for supporting health, acquired by Dr Tawfik Canaan from rural patients (Ju'beh 2005). In an archaeological museum, many of these items would be called beads rather than amulets, but hand-written labels by Canaan record specific medicinal properties sought by their wearers, such as that two yellow - and white-banded glass barrel shapes were to be worn against vomiting bile/children up to 4 (Birzeit n. d.). In rural Egypt under British military occupation, the English anthropologist Winifred Blackman also collected items of jewelry, recording age and gender associations and local significance for health (Blackman 1927).
Among ancient finds, recurrent associations of gender or age offer clues to meaning. Leg - and hand-shaped amulets typical for burials of young women (2200-2000 Bc) are generally of red carnelian, as if evoking menstrual blood at entry into puberty. However, the same material might carry multiple associations. At a New Kingdom palace by the entrance to Fayoum province, one individual was buried with 16 strings of beads, predominantly blood-red carnelian; one scorpion pendant of carnelian; another of gilt faience; and seal-amulets inscribed with the image of a scorpion (Petrie 1931). The repetition of the scorpion motif might evoke the title controller of Serqet (see section Healer Titles and Roles). However, as with the Madja burial, it is not clear whether material with the deceased relates to the role in life or to motifs of eternal protection within the general pattern of burial customs, even, conceivably, a unique strategy thought necessary for someone at the palace who had been struck down by scorpion bite or snakebite.
A papyrus from 1500 BC contains incantations for health of mother and child, in some instances to be spoken over sets of beads of particular materials or strung with specific numbers of knots. Evidently, particular combinations or sequences of material could be as powerful as the individual components, but this is hard to corroborate from excavated examples. Excavations only rarely yield bead strings that are sufficiently well preserved and recorded to confirm their ancient arrangement. In the largest collection, some 2000 strings, fewer than 50, are in original order, despite this being a special interest of the collector and archaeologist Flinders Petrie (Nai 1945). Two examples from the cemeteries at Sidmant indicate the potential for future research into material meanings. From the burial of a young girl, 2100 BC, on a string of green and black faience beads, disk rings alternate with rosettes, punctuated by a cylinder, a crumb-coated bead, and a disk on which the wedjat, “health,” eye is incised. A burial of about 1500 bc had a string of carnelian, blue faience, and ostrich eggshell disk beads, none of which would be classified as an amulet from their form.
World History
