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The earliest groups of locally produced scarabs from Palestine The question of local scarab-production in the MBA was raised time and again since the beginning of the 20st century. While R. Weill favoured a local production W.M.F Petrie rejected the idea first emphatically. later, while digging on the Tell el-'Ajjul he admitted the local production of soem deteriorated types. M. Pieper and H. Stock, two German Egyptologists drew attention to the fact that there are figurative scarabs of the Palestinian MBA with motifs totally absent from real Egyptian scarabs. O. Tufnell, J.M. Weinstein, W.A. Ward and W.G. Dever concentrated their efforts on dating rather than on the issue of local or imported. They established by archaeological contexts several groups of early scarabs. Since the mid 80ies S. Schroer and the speaker isolated locally produced groups by motifs and in the case of the Omega-group by style. In 1997 D. Ben-Tor presented further criteria, mainly particular un-Egyptian forms of hieroglyphs, to distinguish local scarabs from imported ones. The lecture will focus on several groups of scarabs considered by archaelogical contexts as early and analyze their features, style and iconography/design. It will be shown that there is a limited number of groups and types, which are all local and whose iconography is partly local or at least Asiatic, partly dependent on Egyptian prototypes. The lecture tries to demonstrate that there is - at least in some cases - a connection between the function and the design of the scarabs. |
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