Buttons and Design Scarabs

By W.M. Flinders Petrie

This facsimile reissue of Flinders Petrie’s extensive catalog of buttons and scarabs describes and illustrates over 1500 examples, along with an appendix on additions to the ‘Scarabs and Cylinders’ volume published earlier.

In keeping with his other object catalogs, Petrie devises object classifications based on form with an attempt at dating their sequences. He describes the back of the objects, materials, their designs and inscriptions, and offers ideas on their meanings. Particular attention is paid to animal and human representations and those possibly of gods. He also identifies several local series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Apr 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888570050

W.M. Flinders Petrie

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) was a pioneer in the field of ‘modern’ archaeology. He introduced the stratigraphical approach in his Egyptian campaigns that underpins modern excavation techniques, explored scientific approaches to analysis and developed detailed typological studies of artefact classification and recording, which allowed for the stratigraphic dating of archaeological layers. He excavated and surveyed over 30 sites in Egypt, including Giza, Luxor, Amarna and Tell Nebesheh.

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CHAPTER I

BUTTONS.

1. I

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recent years a class of objects has come into notice which belongs to an obscure part of Egyptian history. These have been called Buttons or Button seals. That they are button-shaped is clear, having a pierced loop on the back; that they are seals is a theory, for which we have not a single example of such a sealing in support. They might be seals, or amulets, or badges of rank or office, or a mixture of these. As occasionally some of them have forms in relief (76, 82), this is against the use of them for sealing. It is best therefore to keep to the unquestionable fact of the button form, and call them buttons; understanding that they are not buttons for fastening, any more than a Chinese mandarin’s button of rank. A point to observe is the frequent repetition of the same signs, or others, inverted; no people made seals of which one half must be upside down, but a button worn as a badge might be looked at in any position, and in inverting half of it, one part would be always intelligible to the view.

The various Classes.

2. The work of these buttons is essentially not Egyptian, though copying Egyptian subjects; and it runs on into various other objects of more or less Egyptian style, which yet always have an un-Egyptian feeling. These are therefore all taken together here under the class of buttons, though they adopt many different forms. The various classes, beside buttons proper, are human or animal figures with designs on the base (27, 96), pyramidal squares (28—38), dumps pierced through (89, 202), prisms (233—236), plaques (237—238), cowroids (239—242), scarabs (263—266), handled seals (271—272), conical black stone seals (273—278), foot- and hand-shaped seals (279—282), late glazed buttons (283—288), and some conical orientalised seals (289—292) which are also placed here together. Thus we are led on by style to treat in one class very different kinds of objects, which cannot well be included in any regular category of the usual Egyptian things. As objects showing foreign influence in Egypt may help to explain each other, there is the less objection to placing together such a variety of forms. They are all homeless strangers in Egypt.

Dated Examples.

3. The dating of this class of buttons has been much helped by the work on the cemetery at Qau, ranging from the IVth to Xth dynasties (pl. V). The ultimate framing of the dates is fixed by the alabaster vases with kings’ names of the IVth to VIth dynasty, which show the age of other forms of vases found with them,—the known decadence suddenly produced by the Syrian invasion of the VIIth dynasty,—the revival of scarabs and Egyptian work under the IXth, fixed by the objects at Sedment, beginning with the new capital at Herakleopolis,—lastly the styles of vases and objects which lead up to the well dated groups of the XIIth dynasty. Thus the two ends of the chain are firm, and the conclusions from political changes between may be accepted as obvious, since they reasonably divide the mass of intervening material. Drawings of all objects in the dating groups will appear in the volume on Qau.

There are from Qau 21 groups which include buttons or scarabs with alabaster and pottery; the forms of the vases shew their order by their gradations, and thus give a series of buttons dated from the IVth to the IXth dynasties. These serve as a guide to the period of the examples found without vases, but the directly dated specimens are on pl. V before each dynastic group, and must be kept mainly in view; others are only dated by style. The buttons from Qau are nearly all smaller than those from elsewhere and different in appearance; but there is sufficient connection of types to help in the general dating. What sources have supplied the bulk of those already known, have never been stated, but some other large centres must have been plundered out twenty years ago. Those from Hu are like the Qau types, see Biospolis