30 SCARABiEID^ — DUNG-BEETLES. 



Buprestis embalmed in a tomb at Thebes.^ But the Scara- 

 bseus, or Ateuchus sacer, is the beetle most commonly 

 represented, and the type of the whole class ; and the one 

 referred to in this article under the general name of Scara- 

 bsei(s, unless when otherwise particularly mentioned. 



The Scarabaeus, according to the beliefs of the ancient 

 Egyptians, was sacred to the Sun and to Pthah, the personi- 

 fic'ation of the creative power of the Deity ; and it was 

 adopted as an emblem or symbol of — 



1. The World — According to P. Yalerianus, the Scarab 

 was symbolical of the world, on account of the globular 

 form of its pellets of dung, and from an odd notion that 

 they were rolled from sunrise to sunset.^ 



2. The Sun. — P. Yalerianus supposes this insect to have 

 been a symbol of the sun, because of the angular projection 

 from its head resembling rays, and from the thirty joints of 

 the six tarsi of its feet answering to the days of an (ordi- 

 nary) solar month.3 According to Plutarch, it was because 

 these insects cast the seed of generation into round balls of 

 dung, as a genial nidus, and roll them backward Avith their 

 feet, while they themselves look directly forward. And as 

 the sun appears to proceed in the heavens in a course con- 

 trary to the signs, thus the Scarabsi turn their balls toward 

 the west, while they themselves continue creeping toward 

 the east ; by the first of these motions exhibiting the diurnal, 

 and by the second the annual, motion of the earth and the 

 planets.* Porphyry gives the same reason as Plutarch 

 why the beetle was considered, as he calls it, "a living 

 image of the sun."^ Horapollo assigns two reasons for the 



1 Wilkinson, And. Egypt., ii. (2d S.) 259. 



2 Val. Hieroglyphica, p. 93-5. 



3 Ibid. 



* Plut. Of I sis and Osiris, p. 220. The translation of this passage 

 as given by Philemon Holland is as follows: "The Fly called the 

 Beetill they (the Egyptians) reverence, because they observe in 

 them I wot not what little slender Images (like as in drops of water 



we see the resemblance of the Sun) of the Divine power 



As for the Beetills, they hold, that throughout all their kinds there 

 is no female, but all the males do blow or cast their seed into a 

 certain globus or round matter in the form of balls, which they 

 drive from them and roll to and fro contrariwise, like as the Sun, 

 when he moveth himself from the West to the East, seemeth to turn 

 about the Heaven clean contrary." — p. 1071, ed. of 1657. 



5 Quot. by Montfaucon, Antiq., vol. ii., Part 2, p. 322. 



