32 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. XI 



Only the scarabs now dug up tell the world of Phoenicia, of whose 

 cities, like Carthage, its colony, not one reminiscent stone remains 

 on another. Possibly the Phoenicians reached the Hottentots. 

 They certainly introduced the scarab to the Etruscans, who were 

 the most powerful people of Italy before the rise of the Romans. 

 Scarab effigies are still numerous in Etruria. They ceased to be 

 made when Etruscan industry was carried to Rome. They came 

 afresh from Egypt three centuries after the Christian Era and 

 became adopted as a Christian symbol. St. Ambrose, the famous 

 Archbishop of Milan, the converter of St. Augustine, wrote of 

 " Jesus, the good Scarabseus, who rolled up before him the hitherto 

 unshapen mud of our bodies." The symbol survives. The 

 scarab is carved now on many an ItaHan tomb. 



From the rock tombs come the best pictures of all Egypt. Only 

 one other beetle is drawn, a cetonian eating a leaf. There are 



Fig. II. 

 Fig. II shows two of the three butterflies from a wonderful drawing on 

 a rock tomb at Benihassan. The whole picture is of a papyrus thicket. 

 In the water is a sturgeon-like fish and a sea cow. In the grass are five 

 bird's nests, with eggs and young. An ichneumon is shown hunting for 

 eggs. Above are seven species of birds, alight, on the nest or in flight. 

 While the butterflies are of the same species, they differ in body marking 

 and shape of wing. Note especially that the artist was not an entomolo- 

 gist. His butterflies have caudal appendages. 



a number of the honey bee, which was plentifully kept in the Nile 

 valley. There is one graphic picture of a Sphex preying on a 

 spider. Wasps of the Vespa group, as well as Sphex, are very 

 common, but they are conventionalized. Four of them are shown 

 here, explained in the footnotes. In the paper, " The Earhest 

 Insects in the World," there is an explanation of the origin of the 

 wasps, and their power of inflicting death. There is a close re- 

 lationship between Persia and Egypt, dating prior to 6,000 B. C. 



