WALTERS-EG
Walters Art Museum (Egyptian) · jewelry
Scarab with Script Sign Combination
Description
<p>This steatite scarab has a flat underside with a vertically arranged design with a 'Maat' and longevity/omnipresence of Amun theme composed of four signs lacking syntactical context. The design of the back is simple with unbalanced body proportions and good workmanship. The piece is carefully made. This scarab functioned as a supportive amulet and should secure life and justice. The piece could serve in this world and in the afterlife; as Amun's trigram, it should assure the support of the god. It would have originally been mounted or threaded.</p><p>For the latest information about this object, <cite><a href='https://purl.thewalters.org/art/42.55' rel='external'>Scarab with Script Sign Combination</a></cite>, visit the Online Collection of the Walters Art Museum.</p>
AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano
Machine-generated from the object's image on Jul 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.
A small scarab-shaped Egyptian amulet made of beige stone with a green-blue glazed surface, bearing an incised script-sign combination on its back.
The image shows the dorsal (inscribed) face of a scarab amulet. The stone surface is predominantly beige/light cream beneath a turquoise-green to green-blue glaze that appears worn in places, with darker speckling and crackle/pitting consistent with age or wear. Two large, incised sign-like forms occupy the center and right areas; the left side includes a rounded oval-like element above a short horizontal stroke and a small hook/step-like mark. The lower register contains a horizontal line with an additional small notch/segment toward the left and an angular or wedge-like form near the bottom. The incisions are filled/outlined by darker residue, making the sign shapes stand out against the glazed ground. No clear royal titulary (cartouches) or deity iconography is visible beyond the abstract script-sign carving. No separate Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is visible. Condition appears good with surface wear to the glaze and incision edges.
decorative
unknown (likely Late Period to Ptolemaic scarab tradition; cannot confirm from image alone)
good
Materials
beige steatite (as catalogued)green-blue glaze
Signs
Incised script-sign combination (individual signs unclear) ×2
Visible text
"Visible as an incised Egyptian script-sign combination; individual sign values are unclear from the image."
Inscriptions (1)
Inscription #1
English description
[Translation] Group of four hieroglyphic signs, which does not provide a syntactical context: Lord/all (?) - life - Maat - Lord/all (?).
Cross-references (2)
- Walters-AccNum 42.55 tier-2
- Walters-id 7050 tier-2
Similar inscriptions · by content embedding
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Walters Art Museum (Egyptian).
- AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
- Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
- Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.