The Heart Scarab and the Ib Amulet in the Judgement of the Dead

For the Egyptians, thought, memory and will did not reside in the brain but in the heart, called ib. During mummification the brain was removed and discarded, while the heart was as a rule left in the body. Around this organ there developed a family of amulets meant to protect it and, above all, to ensure that it did not betray its owner at the most delicate moment of the afterlife: judgement before the gods.

The weighing of the heart

The Book of the Dead describes the deceased before Osiris and the divine judges. In the most famous scene, depicted on many New Kingdom papyri, the heart is placed on one pan of the scales and the feather of Maat, goddess of truth and order, on the other. Anubis tends the balance, Thoth records the result. If the heart is weighed down by wrongdoing, a monstrous creature called Ammit, part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus, stands ready to devour it, condemning the deceased to final annihilation.

The heart scarab

To avert this outcome, a large stone scarab, often dark green or black, was placed on the chest of the mummy, bearing on its base chapter 30B of the Book of the Dead. The formula addresses the heart directly and opens with a repeated invocation: “O my heart of my mother, O my heart of my mother”. The deceased asks the heart not to rise up against him as a witness, not to oppose him before the judges and not to make him appear guilty before the keeper of the balance.

Heart scarabs appear regularly in the New Kingdom, with earlier precedents, and remained in use until the Late Period. The British Museum holds the heart scarab of a king named Sobekemsaf, of the Seventeenth Dynasty, with a human face in place of the insect's head and a gold mount. Common materials were green jasper, serpentine, basalt and obsidian, hard dark stones that gave the object weight and solemnity.

The vase-shaped amulet

Beside the scarab there was a smaller amulet reproducing the hieroglyph for the heart, resembling a rounded vase with two handles. Made of carnelian, glass or faience, it was hung at the neck and linked to the chapters of the Book of the Dead devoted to the heart, between 26 and 29, which ask for its preservation and return to the deceased in the afterlife. Some mummies have several of them, sometimes together with the scarab, a sign of reinforced protection.

Stones and symbols

The colour of the stones was not accidental. Green evoked the vegetation that springs up again after the Nile flood and hence regeneration, while the red of carnelian recalled vital force and blood. Some heart scarabs bear, besides the text, figures of the deceased in adoration or of the solar barque, stressing the link between judgement and the daily cycle of the sun. Others are mounted in gold pectorals, together with images of Isis and Nephthys.

These objects reveal a surprising moral conception. The heart could become a witness for the prosecution, and the amulet served to secure its silence or its loyalty. In the heart scarab we thus meet the power attributed to the written word and an ancient reflection, in many ways still relevant, on the relationship between conscience, memory and judgement.