5.8: Writing as Protection

Some uses of writing are designed to be very personal, and into this class fall a number of inscribed objects that would usually be worn close to the body, including scarabs, cylinder seals, beads, pendants, and finger rings. These could serve a dual function of adornment and protection, and so were generally suited to roles both in life and death.

Scarabs and Scaraboids

Scarabs and scaraboids were a popular personal possession in the southern Levant. A narrow perforation was bored through the centre, which allowed them to be mounted and worn in a variety of ways. They could be threaded onto a string and worn around the neck or wrist, traces of which rarely survive in the archaeological record other than by the position of the scarab on the body in tombs. Scarabs could also be mounted onto a narrow pin, which fitted into the flattened and perforated ends of a metal finger ring. The pin fitted loosely, allowing the scarab to be swivelled on its setting so it could be worn with the inscribed base flat against the skin for comfort, but rotated if the owner wished to look at the inscription or use it as a seal.

This most Egyptian of objects was adopted and then adapted by Canaanite craftspeople, who set up their own workshops during the Middle Bronze Age, perhaps under the influence of Canaanite communities in the Egyptian Delta and Byblos (Ben-Tor 1998: 162; Goldwasser 2006: 122). Their popularity quickly spread, so that by the MBIIB scarabs were considered an important part of the funerary assemblage; at Jericho, for example, they appear in nearly 70% of all Middle Bronze Age tombs. Most people now agree that their primary function in these contexts was as a protective amulet (Ben-Tor 1998: 162). A variant on the inscribed scarab is an all-in-one faience ring, a form that appears in Egypt during the early 18th dynasty, and somewhat later in the Levant (Higginbotham 2000: 245). These typically comprise either a royal name or a religious inscription; less commonly they might feature a single amuletic sign, such as an udjet, which represented the eye of Horus (e.g. James and McGovern 1993: fig. 74.1). They are therefore less diverse in design and content than contemporary scarabs, although their function is assumed to be similar. However, their design is always visible, worn openly on the hand, whereas scarabs were mounted with the inscribed surface hidden against the skin.

While some of these objects were imported directly from Egypt, and represent canonical use of writing for their form, this was not always the case with locally produced scarabs. The way in which hieroglyphic writing was adapted within Canaanite workshops suggests that the signs were not being read as texts per se, with the appearance of pseudo-hieroglyphs and errors in the shape of various signs, as well as combinations of signs that make no linguistic sense (Ben-Tor 1998: 158). However the limited repertoire that is borrowed and repeated as decorative elements, often arranged into symmetrical patterns, may point to the borrowed signs having particular significance to Canaanite markets. As a pictorial script, this sort of transference is entirely plausible (Goldwasser 2006: 121). Either way, the popularity of scarabs and scaraboids meant that many Canaanites were able to come into close personal contact with Egyptian hieroglyphs and to develop a familiarity with the general appearance of the script, without necessarily developing any literary skills. They were accessible, in a way that some votive texts, funerary stelae or lintels over the doorways of Egyptian administrative buildings may not have been.

I sampled a series of scarab assemblages from sites across the region in order to examine this phenomenon and test how important hieroglyphs were as an element in this class of object. These were chosen on the basis of the availability of comprehensive scarab data for each site, and to represent possible regional variation based on geographic location; to avoid contaminating the results, purchased scarabs and those found in post-LB contexts were excluded. This resulted in a dataset of 1205 scarabs from Tell el-‘Ajjul, 401 scarabs from Jericho, 71 from Pella and 430 from Lachish. The scarabs from each of these sites were analysed according to the role played by hieroglyphic signs in scarab decoration. The aim was not to distinguish between good or ‘readable’ inscriptions and the more decorative or symbolic uses of hieroglyphs, but to determine how important script elements were to the overall design, and hence function, of scarabs in the Southern Levant. The more prominent this element, the more visible, and hence accessible it becomes to Canaanite populations on the most personal of levels.

The assemblage was categorised into scarabs based purely on figurative imagery (humans, dei- ties, animals) or geometric designs (scrolls, twists, concentric circles), and those which incor- porated hieroglyphs, either as the sole decoration or as filler motifs surrounding figurative or geometric scenes. This enabled a comparison of scarabs with and without script, which demon- strated an interesting phenomenon: irrespective of location, in all the sites studied script-based scarabs made up between two thirds and three quarters of the total scarab assemblage (Figure 10). This shows that to local consumers text was somehow seen as an important part of what a scarab was and how it functioned. Most Canaanites, it would seem, wanted their scarabs to have hieroglyphs. This may well relate to the idea that writing has power, and is therefore particularly suitable for objects that have protective or magical functions; in such a case, not being able to read such writing only adds to its value and mystique. The fact that the writing was Egyptian, and therefore foreign and exotic, may have only served to increase its potency; while of course by the time of the Late Bronze Age there were other associations to be made, namely with a country and culture that had become the dominant political and military power of the region.

Another class of object where we might expect to see a similar use of writing is the cylinder seal, which was frequently used as an amuletic or votive item, and which could be worn in a ring, as a necklace, or suspended from a toggle pin. However here we see that text, or elements of text, were very much the exception rather than the rule, and where they do appear, there is a stronger asso- ciation with semi-precious materials such as jasper, lapis lazuli and hematite than less prestigious materials such as faience, although the latter does occur. Those that carry cuneiform inscriptions are mostly concerned with seal ownership (Horowitz et al. 2006: 39, 47, 95–97, 105–107, 149); however the rare examples with Egyptian script are more eclectic. An example from Tell Far’ah South offers a combination of signs more usually seen on the Canaanite anra scarab series, so- called after its use of a particular subset of hieroglyphs, and which presumably carried the same local significance, although they do not make any sense as an Egyptian text (Parker 1949: 10, no. 17; Richards 2001: 11–12). Another seal from Jericho is more of a cultural mix, incorporating two ankhs into an otherwise very Near Eastern scene (Teissier 1996: 115, cat. 242), and one from Tell Beit Mirsim goes so far as to use both hieroglyphs and what may be stylised cuneiform signs together (Teissier 1996: 110, cat. 226).

Amulets

The Late Bronze II period sees the introduction of a small group of amuletic pendants, the shape of which are based on individual Egyptian hieroglyphs (Figure 11). These made up some 14% of McGovern’s corpus of pendant types for the region (to which can be added James and McGovern 1993: fig. 75.5, making 117 examples), and eight basic types appear to be represented — corresponding to the ankh, djed, heh, tit, udjet, hst, ib, and nefer signs (McGovern 1985: class V, 58). Many of these signs are also common to the local scarab series — with the ankh, djed, udjet, and nefer being especially popular. Like the scarabs these are very personal objects that would probably have been accessible to people outside the official administration. A number of these amulets are prescribed funerary types from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (e.g. Andrews 1994: tit 44, ib 72, and djed 83), although this is not always the type of context in which they appear to have been deposited in the Levant (see Table 2).

These amulets appear to have a comparatively limited distribution, having been found at Beth Shan, Megiddo, Tell Abu Hawam, Dhahrat el-Humraiya, Lachish, and Tell el-‘Ajjul. There was a particular clustering of examples at Beth Shan, where they may actually represent a rather limited number of individual collar necklaces (McGovern 1985: 63, 128); there is also evidence that many of these may have originated in Egyptian-run faience workshops at the site (James and McGovern 1993: 162). Those signs with a naturally vertical orientation may have a single suspension loop at the top, and so could have been worn as pendants. Others in this class have loops at both top and bottom, and were probably strung as elements in a more complex, perhaps even multi-stranded piece of jewellery. The exception appears to be the udjet amulet, or ‘Eye of Horus’, which has a nat- urally horizontal orientation and is perforated through its length in order to maintain this. While these objects could have been used as everyday amulets by either Egyptians or Canaanites, the fact that the majority of examples are known from temple contexts has suggested that they were probably used as votive offerings or to dress cult statues (James and McGovern 1993: 128–129). It seems likely that many people using these amulets would not be able to ‘read’ the script these signs were taken from; yet the way the design maintains some sense of orientation shows that this was considered an aspect worth preserving. It is equally likely that there was an accepted meaning for each type, and that they were told this significance when purchasing the items. It is less clear whether the owners and depositors of these objects were Egyptian or Canaanite, and it is worth remembering that amulets in the shape of hieroglyphic signs may have been assigned a different set of meanings, depending on the cultural background of the user.