Scarab bracelet mystery … the “hieroglyphs”

What are the markings on the backs of scarab bracelet stones? Hieroglyphs? Kanji? Or nonesense?

Drawings of the markings on the backs of my scarab bracelet cabochons. They’re supposed to be hieroglyphs, but I’m not so sure …

One of the things I mentioned in my first post about scarab bracelets is that on many of the bracelets in my collection — which are typical examples of 20th century pop culture bracelets — the underside of the cabochons are marked. What I’d heard (chatting to antique store proprietors mostly, but you also see it online) is that the marks are “hieroglyphs.”

The stones are intended to function as charms; the inscriptions confer luck or blessings on the wearer.

Cotinis mutabilis figeater beetle

There are 30,000 species of Scarab beetles worldwide. I came across these (deceased… RIP pretty green beetles!) Fig Eater beetles a few weeks ago on the sidewalk by my house.

There’s some merit to the idea. The scarab itself is symbolic of pretty powerful stuff, although it’s not quite as straightforward as “it’s the good luck beetle.” Per this paper published by UCLA,

The scarab was used by the ancient Egyptians as a symbol of the rising sun being pushed across the sky (just as the beetle pushes balls of dung across the sand), exemplifying the notion that the sun god can create his own means of rebirth.

Bit of a leap from a symbol of the god Khepri/divine self-regeneration to “hope you win the lotto/get laid/avoid catching the flu this winter.” But the general idea is there: Wear scarab! Can’t hurt. Might help?

So what about the inscriptions?

“Genuine” scarab amulets — meaning museum quality / ancient Egyptian — had inscriptions carved on the back. There are some images in that UCLA paper of some of them, with translations. One inscription commemorates the building of a lake. Others are names. Here’s an edited version of a translation of an inscription that conferred a blessing; the inscription is the

… throne name of Thutmose III … [and] “the good god Menkheperra,” and below this an anx sign, meaning “may he live.” Menkheperra can also be read cryptographically as the name Amen-ra (sun disk).

“May he live” is a solid blessing to carry in your pocket for sure.

Scarab bracelets

Three of my scarab bracelets.

But fast forward to bracelets like the ones I own.

These aren’t ancient Egyptian amulets. They were made and sold in the 20th Century by costume jewelry makers.

People that bought them probably assumed that the markings on the back were hieroglyphs. But are they, really?

I did a bit of poking around the interwebs.

Logical first step: do an image search on Egyptian hieroglyphics to see if any of the symbols on the backs of my stones are obvious matches.

One of the things that seems pretty obvious, to my eye anyway, is that hieroglyphs are a completely different type of mark. They’re more pictorial, generally.

For example, here’s hieroglyphs from this online image next to my drawings of the marks on my bracelets. They really don’t look anything alike.

real Egyptian hieroglyphs don't look anything like the marks on the backs of my braceletsI combed through pages of Egyptian hieroglyphs. I didn’t find a single one that resembled the marks on my bracelets.

You’d expect, if the bracelet manufacturers were really trying, that they’d at least put an ankh on a couple of the stones, or an Eye of Horus. But nope.

Here’s another example, this one of cursive hieroglyphics from The Papyrus of Ani:

Cursive hieroglyphics from the Papyrus of Ani compared to marks on my scarab braceletsArguably a little bit closer — but still a huge stretch to imagine any of the marks on any of my bracelets is a 1:1 for a mark on that piece of scroll.

In fact, to my eye, the marks on my bracelets look more like kanji (Chinese characters) than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Japanese kanji are the closest to my eye. Here’s an image of Japanese kanji that I found on this site. There’s a pretty strong resemblance between these words and the marks on my bracelets — or anyway, stronger resemblance than to hieroglyphs …

Kanji image from https://awordfromjapan.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/why-learn-bushu-building-blocks-of-kanji/Which led me to Hypothesis #2:

Maybe the stones were sourced from Asia, and maybe the people that carved them inscribed messages in Chinese or Japanese!

Oooh!!!!

Well. As it turns out, there are tools galore online that let you draw kanji and then display the English translation.

Here’s one.

Tell you what, go play, if you have a scarab bracelet and think maybe the marks are kanji. But for my part, by the time I was done messing around on those tools for an hour or so, I started to feel a little foolish.

I wondered if I should even blog about this. I wondered if people who read and write Japanese wouldn’t find it laughable.

“Really? You thought the marks on my bracelets might be real words???”

So let me go out on a limb, here, with Hypothesis #3:

The marks on the backs of these bracelets are nonsense symbols.

They are random marks carved by stone workers who mass produced cabochons for US costume jewelry makers. They made simple marks, because simple marks are easy, and these were being mass produced after all.

The same marks show up on jewelry from different makers because makers often sourced their stones from common suppliers.

If you see any holes in my logic — or know of any evidence that either supports or refutes my latest/greatest hypothesis — drop me a line or leave a note in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

(And if you haven’t read my other posts on scarab bracelets, here is my first post, and here is my second.

Pssst. Are you a reader?

Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen

Meet Marion Flarey.

She’s out of a job.

Buried in school loan debt. About to be homeless.

And she’s no Rapunzel.

She doesn’t even have long hair.

But she just found an apartment.

And it has a Tower…

Once Upon a Flarey Tale.

Available on Amazon for Kindle or print, or click here to select from other e-formats.

Book 1 of my Marion Flarey Series.

Winner, 2020 Incipere Award for Women’s Fiction, Clean.

A thing for scarab bracelets

scarab bracelet close upThis “thing” started because my mom gave me a bracelet and because of a dream.

In the dream, I purchased a gold-filled bracelet with semi-precious stones.

I grew up in a part of the country where the pre-Columbian inhabitants were Iroquois peoples, and as you may know they had a special relationship with dreams: they would act them out. Such a striking thing, this idea that you should deliberately carry over something from that world to this, the dreaming world to the waking. Interweave them, make the dream into something solid, “objective.”

I don’t make it practice to act out my dreams but in this case I didn’t hesitate. I immediately started shopping for a scarab bracelet like the one in my dream. Ebay, antique marts. I subsequently bought several. I’ll post pictures.

I didn’t spend a lot of money on this little collection. There are 14K gold versions. I stuck to 12K golf-filled. I rarely spent more than about $30.

I also became very curious about them–but interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information lying about on the interwebs about this particular category of bracelet.

By which I mean: costume jewelry that was made/sold in the mid-20th century.

reverse side scarab bracelet hieroglyphics

Are they “real” hieroglyphics? Inquiring minds want to know…

Scarab jewelry, more broadly, has been popular–on and off, wildly popular–at various times in recent history. The discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 set off the first of the wildly popular periods. You can find pieces from this period which feature scarabs as well as many other Egyptian motifs. Some of it is very beautiful, with such a lovely 20’s feel, some a little styled as Art Deco. My sense of this jewelry is that it tends to feature single scarabs; much has a heavier “museum piece” sort of feel.

What’s less clear is what happened a bit later, in the 50s or so, when this new sort of bracelet became popular.

(And by the way: if you were in the jewelry business back then and know anything about this, please contact me! I’ve tried to find someone who was there at the time and have struck out, so far.)

I deduce from the enormous number of the bracelets floating around on ebay and the like that a LOT of them were made.

The other thing that is interesting is that–to my eye at least–the stones have a kind of mass-produced look to them. By which I mean, you can find bracelets that were made and sold by different designers, but the stones appear to be very similar. So there must have been some sort of supplier/supply chain aspect to this. Jewelry designers were sourcing stones from somewhere … but where?

In most cases, the stones are oval cabochons. The dome is carved (etched?) with markings to show it’s a scarab: the ponotrum, the elytral suture (line between the elytra, the hard covering over a beetle’s flying wings). The underside almost always has carvings on it as well, which are supposed to be hieroglyphics that confer luck or blessings. I’ve not had a lot of success–yet–finding out exactly what the symbols are or what they mean, or are supposed to mean.

If you pay any attention to mythology you know the scarab beetle has a long history of mythological associations. I won’t reproduce it all here, since a google search will do a better job than I can, but suffice to say it’s associated with transformation and rebirth; with death giving birth to life; with immortality; and with the sun (including the sun as Ra).

I’ll post more about these as I figure more out. But in the meantime, here are my bracelets, with a little bit about them :)

mid century scarab bracelet#1. This pastel bracelet is the one my mom gave me. She had it as a girl/teen so it is most definitely 1950s vintage.

I’m no jewelry or manufacturing expert, but these cabochons are plastic, so I assume they were molded. There are no hieroglyphics on the backs. There’s some blueish corrosion on the metal–this isn’t “fine jewelry”! But I love it because it’s light and … I just realized when I tool all my pics I should have put something in the photo for scale. Sorry :/

For this bracelet, the cabochons are very small (about 7/8ths of an inch each), so the bracelet is lightweight, which is so nice for wearing, and the pastel colors pair perfectly when you’re wearing pastel colors.

Thanks, Mom, I love this and love that you had it as a girl :)

mid century scarab bracelet#2. The cabochons on this second bracelet are even smaller than the ones on my mom’s bracelet. But these are “real” stones. They have hieroglyphics on the backs.

It’s marked that it’s 12K gf on the clasp.

Many of these bracelets have a safety link, which I find utterly endearing. This sense that it’s something precious, so you need a bit of extra protection to ensure it doesn’t fall off your wrist and get lost.

mid century scarab bracelet#3. This is one of the first bracelets I purchased and one of my favorites to wear, because the cabochons are smaller/lighter, making it a nice piece of everyday sort of jewelry.

The cabochons are more elongated than you usually see on these bracelets, so it’s not really a typical shape.

There’s a mark on the clasp that may be a designer mark, but I have to research it a bit more, so I’ll post an update (hopefully) at some point. The mark is a bit off the edge which makes it hard to be sure of the letters. It looks like BUJAN or 8UJAN maybe?

mid century scarab bracelet#4. This is the first bracelet I bought after my dream, and is what I think of as the classic ’50s scarab costume bracelet.

It’s got a mark so I’ll come back later with what I can dig up about the designer.

One thing I didn’t notice when I bought this (:/) is that the pink stone has some internal fractures that, in some light, give it a cracked/damaged appearance. I think I read somewhere that this can happen to some of the softer stones. But the stone is intact and as you may have gathered, I use these bracelets for everyday wear, so I don’t mind the cracks. Much.

mid century scarab bracelet#5. This is sometimes my favorite bracelet of the collection. It’s a bit more hefty than the ones I’ve pictured so far–the cabochons are a bit more than a half-inch long each. So when you wear it, you really notice it–you feel like you’re wearing jewelry. But at the same time, it’s not hugely flashy. And because there are so many colors, it pairs with just about anything.

It’s got a mark.

I also love how the safety chain is so small and delicate relative to the rest of the bracelet. I wear this one a lot :)

mid century scarab bracelet#6. This bracelet doesn’t have a safety chain at all. And the stones are larger–the largest of any of my scarab bracelets. About 3/4 inch each. So with the size of the stones, there are only 5 versus 6 in the previous bracelet. Needless to say it’s also the second heaviest bracelet of this little collection.

It’s got that nice bright blue lapis stone which is wonderful, and I also love the translucent two-toned stone (quartz?) on the right, and the way the designer aligned it so that the darker band is across the beetle’s “head.”

It doesn’t seem to have a mark.

heavy mid century scarab bracelet#7. This is the heaviest of my scarab bracelets. Each individual stone isn’t that large (the same length as the stones in #4) but there are seven of them, and they are deeper/thicker than any of the other bracelet stones.

It’s got a mark so I’ll be back on this one.

The stones on this one are particularly lovely, aren’t they?

The identification of the stones is worth a whole separate post as well, btw …

silver scarab bracelet#8. I didn’t start wearing this one until recently. I bought it at an antique shop in the Finger Lakes, back east, and for a long time I think I sort of avoided it because it’s not gold. But recently I’ve realize that I really, really like it, and it’s become one of my favorite bracelets to wear. I love how the stone colors are so cool. It pairs so well with anything blue or navy. I also love that there are those pretty links between the stones.

unusual mid century scarab bracelet#9. Last one! And the most atypical of them all, right? The cabochons are perfectly round–they almost don’t even look like scarabs, although the carvings on the stones adhere to the motif, without question.

It’s got no hieroglyphics on the back.

I wear this one the least … in fact, I don’t know as I’ve ever worn it. It’s a bit too … bright. I feel like it kind of crosses the line from a kind of funky cultural relic into something that someone would have tried to pass off as almost-fine. Like: the cool kids were all wearing scarab stone bracelets, now here’s a version for grandma.

If I do wear it, it will be on a night when I truly dress up. And I won’t be thinking of it as a scarab bracelet but as a scarab-like bracelet ;)

So that’s my scarab bracelet collection. You can find similar examples all over ebay and etsy. Just don’t think you have to pay a lot of money for the 12K gold fill ones–I’ve seen people list them at very high prices ($80 and up) but if you shop around you’ll find very nice bracelets for under $30. Obviously the 24K versions are more expensive but I was never interested in owning one in that category. I wear these as everyday, casual jewelry. I don’t want something that I have to worry about when I’m wearing it.

I’ll be back with some more posts to delve into these a bit more. There was a whole niche industry dedicated to churning these things out in the 1950s-70s. There has to be someone around who can shed some light into it. Where were the stones sourced? Why were they so popular in this particular period (Elizabeth Taylor/Cleopatra may have had something to do with it!)? Were there any costume jewelry designers who were “known” for scarab bracelets?

Please contact me if you have any inside info–I’d love to interview for a future post!

UPDATES: I posted about the “hieroglyphics” here, and put up some pictures of other bracelets sent in by site visitors here. Enjoy :)

Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen
Her new apartment is a Tower. Will her Prince be far behind?

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