A chronology of amulet forms

Most amulets have survived in burials; only more analysis of use-wear and more settlement archaeology can reveal which types were worn in life. The range changes over time with local focus or within a body grammar of the full set of material formed, and sometimes inscribed, in each period. around 3000 bc, figured amulets are rare. In the large cemeteries near Semenuhor (Kafr Turki), only a few richer burials had small figurines, some for wearing as pendants (Petrie 1914, pl.1). also from the Semenuhor cemeteries, one extraordinary portable form is a small, hollow, beetle-shaped case in calcite, with detachable plug. The excavation director Flinders Petrie identified this as the earliest secure example of reverence for the scarab beetle, but it may be another type; its ancient contents remain unknown. Whichever species served as prototype, the stone case indicates active lines of connection with fauna and geology, comparable in direction with the different deployment of every scale of animal and bird in later periods of Egyptian material production. The burial customs of the mid-third millennium BC did not include the practice of placing jewelry with the deceased, other than ceremonial broad collars made for the burial (Chapter 7), and few town areas of this date have been excavated. As a result, little is known of protective jewelry or amulets for that period, the main pyramid age (Figure 6.4).

The customs change after 2200 bc, and among a wide variety of amulet forms that may continue earlier traditions, some types appear now for the first time in the archaeological record. Flat-based seals for stamping impressions on mud sealings begin to replace the older Mesopotamian cylinder seal, rolling over mud sealings (Wiese 1996). Sealing is a strategy of protection, and seals seem always

Figure 6.4 Calcite beetle vase, with stopper; the excavation director W. Petrie thought it would have contained a desiccated example of the beetle portrayed. W. Petrie, Tarkhan I, 1914, pl.1.

To have been considered imbued with wider protective powers; the term seal-amulet is often used in archaeology to indicate this broad significance, beyond the function of securing contents. Both cylinder seal and stamp-seal continue in use into the second millennium, often on the same strings with beads and amulets. Motifs on the seals, and the forms of the backs, coincide with the pendant amulets, in a unified image world. By 2000 bc, young women of high status in varying contexts, from village to palace, wear buried with girdles of cowry shells, back sliced off to evoke the vulva; examples include actual shells or their form in faience or gold. Fly amulets of glazed steatite are also found, and in the midsecond millennium, larger flies in bone and gold appear; inscriptions after 1500 bc refer to gifts of honor, in military style, perhaps from flies swarming as if on a battlefield (Gestoso Singer 2009). The same form in different materials and scales at different periods seems in this case to vary in meaning.

From the nineteenth century BC, a spectacular series of royal treasures survive from burials of mothers, wives, and daughters of the king, with two sets of jewelry: one placed on or beside the body, made for the tomb, as part of embalming and burial ritual and the other deposited in separate boxes, apparently the items that might have been worn in a ceremony or festival during life (Grajetzki 2014). Items of life jewelry include elaborate openwork pectorals with motifs of victorious king; girdles of gold cowries with amethyst ball beads; and, in place of the earlier leg amulets, anklets with gold claws. Outside the court at this time, richer burials include disk rings and sometimes extremely realistic fish amulets of precious metal. From the same period, on depictions of girls and young women, sometimes wearing cowry girdles, the fish amulet is worn at the end of the hair, tied in a single plait. In dancing scenes, the plait terminals are large blue - and black-glazed ball beads, practical counterweights for rotating in dance, but perhaps also with some of the same power to evoke protection, specifically on the water. From the Lahun town or tombs come faience star and dragonfly amulets; these recall the gold five-pronged stars and butterfly pendants from the burial of the king's daughter Khnumet, found at Dahshur. The royal pendants are decorated in granulation, that is, with minute spheres, a technique imported into Egypt at this time from west Asia, and the forms have been associated with Aegean and Anatolian jewelry (aldred 1971). The Lahun faience examples seem to the local impact of prestigious or sacred motif styles that would have radiated out from kingship centers. The choice of forms might begin with a foreign technique and even a design but also links into earlier Egyptian worlds of significance: the stars are prominent in the literature for the afterlife (Chapter 7), and offering chapel scenes include images of butterflies and dragonflies as part of the rural idyll for eternal good life.

After 1500 bc, the seal-amulets present a twin focus on the name of the king and his father amun-Ra, fusion of the concepts of hiddenness (amun of Thebes) and sun-power (Ra). The clearest single series of amulets is the catalogue of forms from akhetaten, mainly in faience, giving the image world at and immediately after the akhenaten revolution, about 1350 bc (Petrie 1894). Many amulets and ring bezels give name of the king and sun-god, aten, in the radical reformulation of kingship as, exclusively, cult of the visible sun. Others create a world of plant and bird forms in praise of the creation, as already found in kingship temple reliefs of 2450 bc. Alongside Egyptian flora and birds appear animals in the style imported from the Aegean and west asia: dogs racing after deer, or facing goats on their hind legs, nibbling plants. Also, unexpectedly in a city dedicated to Aten, a high proportion of amulets are in the form of protective deities aha/Bes and Ipy/Taweret; these finds may date after the death of akhenaten, when the city continued to function under Tutankhamun.

In the early first millennium BC, birth themes continued to dominate production of faience amulets, with aha/Bes and dwarf motifs. However, new amulet forms refocus on the cults of dangerous goddesses, Bast and Sekhmet, appeased on behalf of the child, and their reverse, Hathor at peace, providing sensuous, including musical, regeneration. Bronze and openwork faience counterpoises for heavy collars evoke Hathor rituals, and the dangerous goddesses are present as faience lioness-headed figurines, found on townsites and in tombs. As in incantations for health (see Writing for good health), the child-patient is modeled on the divine child, simultaneously king and sun-god; though future king, the child is shown as Horus vulnerable in the marshes, needing the protection of the mother Isis.

After 700 BC, there are also amulets evoking the pastoral world along and overlooking the floodplain: goats, ibex, and the branches they feed from are among motifs that had also been prominent in the period of mixed asian-Egyptian rule east of the Delta, 1700-1550 BC. These forms disappear after reunification of Egypt under rulers from Sais in the west Delta, but it is not clear which images take their place: the period 600-300 BC produced the finest faience figurines for motifs such as dwarf and Ipy/Taweret, but they survive from funerary sets. New finds and analyses of used wear may help clarify whether these circulated outside the specialized environment of temple ritual and burial.