ADELA OPPENHEIM: My name is Adela Oppenheim

ISABEL STÜNKEL: I’m Isabel Stünkel

NARRATOR: Adela and Isabel are Egyptologists and curators here at The Met.

STÜNKEL: This is a scarab beetle. And a scarab beetle is a dung beetle which shapes the excrements of other animals into balls that are actually much larger than themselves. They then roll these balls with their hind legs and sink them into underground holes or tunnels, and then later use these dung balls as food stash. 

NARRATOR: But this is not simply a sculpture of a beetle. It’s a manifestation of the sun god, Re.

OPPENHEIM: The ancient Egyptians had a very complicated idea of the solar cycle. In a basic sense, Re is the sun. But he has many different forms. He merges and he separates with other gods and he’s identified with other gods, including Khepri, the beetle. 

Khephri is the morning sun.

So, the ancient Egyptians imagined that in the morning, the sun was in a way pushed over the horizon by a giant beetle.

This moment of the sunrise is equated with a kind of rebirth. And so the beetle itself becomes this very powerful symbol of rebirth.

STÜNKEL: It’s very typical in ancient Egyptian art that these images of deities depict an idea. It’s not that much that ancient Egyptians believed that this is really how the god looks. The idea is more that these images bring across an aspect of the god.

OPPENHEIM: I think even we as Egyptologists, we really don’t even understand the full complexity of the ancient Egyptian thought behind the choices that they made for how their gods are depicted. But they’re thinking about: how was the world created? How was the world maintained?