PHOENICIAN SCARABS. MANUFACTURED MOSTLY AS ARTICLE OF TRADE. USED INSCRIBED SCARABS AS SEALS IN COMMERCIAL AND OTHER TRANSACTIONS. MANY SCARABS FOUND IN SARDINIA.

Archaeologists frequently find in lands bordering on the shores of the Mediterranean sea, scarabs and scarabeoids, on which are engraved subjects which are Egyptian, Chaldean, Assyrian, Hittite or Persian; they were intended apparently to be used as signets, and were incised with short inscriptions in Phoenician, and sometimes, in Aramaic or in Hebrew, giving the name of the owner of the signet.

These had been mostly manufactured in their entirety, as articles of trade, for sale by the ancient merchants of Tyre and Sidon, or they were Egyptian, Assyrian or other originals upon which, Phoenician lapidaries had engraved the name of the later Phoenician owner. In spite of not being an artistic people producing works of originality, this people, the great mariners and merchants of antiquity, had in an eminent degree the genius of assimilation or adaptation, and manufactured cylinders, cones, spheroids, scarabs and signets of all kinds, at first for themselves, and afterwards as an article of sale to the people with whom they traded.

They also used seals in their commercial and maritime transactions, which they surrounded with the same formalities which we find in Assyria, Babylonia and Chaldea. When they dealt with these last mentioned peoples, the Phoenicians came into contact with nations, whose most unimportant transactions were put into writing by a scribe, and sealed in the presence of witnesses, with the seal of the contracting parties. They therefore in dealing with these people were obliged to have and use signets. Such contracts have been found dating between 745-729 B.C.

In the island of Sardinia have been found numerous intaglios under the form of scarabs, they were apparently used as signets. The under parts are incised with Egyptian, Assyro-Chaldean or Persian subjects. In the necropolis of Tharros, an early Phoenician colony situated near the present Torre di San Giovanni di Sinis, have been found more than 600 scarabs ornamented with Egyptian, Assyrian and Persian subjects; and one might believe a colony which came from Egypt or Assyria settled there. These scarabs are usually cut in dark green jasper, some are made of cornelian, others of a glass-paste, rarely in amethyst or sardonyx. The work is variable sometimes carefully done, but none of the scarabs have the clearness of those found in Egypt, nor of the Assyro-Chaldean of Asia. Most of these scarabs, which are always made in nearly the same form, were mounted, some in gold and others in silver; also sometimes in other metals which the corrosions from age had already caused to disappear when they were found.

These intaglios can be divided from the nature of the subjects into three varieties. The first those imitating the Egyptian; the second, the Assyro-Chaldean; and the third, the Persian. All these scarabs are of Phoenician manufacture, but they were probably made in Sardinia, as the remains of the workshops and materials used in making them, have been found there. They do not go back of 500 B.C. The Phoenicians in their colonies, showed no more originality in their work than they did in the mother country, and have been only the intermediary agents between the civilization of the Orient and that of the Occident. This people even counterfeited Egyptian manufactures and antiquities in order to sell them, and the borrowings in their own religion show, they were governed more by the gains of trade than the desires or depths of piety. There are a number in the Cesnola collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

There is a magnificent scarab in green jasper in the British Museum, but where it was produced is not known. It appears to be from the chisel of an Egyptian artist. The base however has been engraved by another; its subject is clearly Assyrian, in the style of work done with the drill, by the artists of Calah. In the field of the signet is a symbol unknown to Assyria or Egypt, below this is evidently the Egyptian ankh or crux ansata and below this is the inscription: “(Signet) of Hodo, the Scribe.” This a beautiful specimen of the intelligent work of the Phoenicians.