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Walters Art Museum (Egyptian) · jewelry

Scarab with Personal Wish Formula

Source of record: Walters Art Museum (Egyptian) — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

<p>This serpentine scarab has a flat underside with a vertically arranged bottom design and inscription. The inscription is a personal wish formula requesting the support and protection of Horus. The design on the back of the scarab is very detailed, with deeply incised lines and regular line flow. The proportions of the top are well balanced. The piece is carefully made, and the workmanship is good. The scarab functioned as a provider individualized amulet with a wish formula. The amulet should provide its owner with the protection of Horus. It would have originally been mounted or threaded. The high quality of the scarab, the unusual writing of the wish formula, and the special variety of the material demonstrate that this scarab was a special production and not part of a usual series.</p><p>For the latest information about this object, <cite><a href='https://purl.thewalters.org/art/42.62' rel='external'>Scarab with Personal Wish Formula</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.

An image shows a greenish, light-brown/olive-green scarab-shaped amulet with engraved lines forming a pseudo-hieroglyphic “wish” text on its face.

The object appears as a single round-backed scarab/knobbed amulet viewed from the front. The surface is mottled green with yellow-brown and darker speckling, suggesting serpentine or a similar stone. Blue-black incised marks run across the scarab’s face in stacked or sweeping lines; the marks resemble arranged signs or cursive hieroglyphic strokes, consistent with a personal wish formula or other protective/beneficial inscription. No clear cartouche, deity figure, or clearly recognizable individual determinatives are confidently identifiable in this low-resolution view. There is no visible modern label or clear Greek/Coptic/Arabic script. The edges show the typical rounded scarab profile; leg/outline details are not fully legible due to lighting and image resolution.

hieroglyphic only unclear (likely Late Period–Ptolemaic scarab amulet tradition based on form, but not certain from image) good
Materials light brownish olive-green serpentine (mottled green/yellow surface)
Signs incised hieroglyph-like strokes forming a text field (individual signs not clearly legible) ×10
Visible text "Incised blue-black strokes forming a text/wish formula; specific signs unreadable from the provided image."

Inscriptions (1)

Inscription #1

English description

[Translation] May the favorite of Horus-son-of-Isis be well and safe.

Connections

Deities Horus

Cross-references (2)

  • Walters-AccNum 42.62 tier-2
  • Walters-id 31906 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.