Scarab and stamp seals — the Pharaonic corpus.
The scarab beetle was the most common form of personal seal in dynastic Egypt for fifteen centuries, with the design's heyday in the Middle and New Kingdoms. The atlas's corpus documents five hundred and ninety-six scarabs and related stamp-seal forms drawn from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055 – 1650 BCE), Second Intermediate Period, New Kingdom (1550 – 1069 BCE), Third Intermediate Period and Late Period (through 525 BCE). Anneke Vermeulen, who joined the atlas in 2020 from Leiden, is the lead editor and brings the Tufnell-Mlinar typological framework that organises the corpus.
The Tufnell-Mlinar typology in brief.
Olga Tufnell's posthumous Studies on Scarab Seals (1984) established the structural typology that the atlas's corpus follows. The typology organises scarabs by back-type, side-type and head-type independently, producing a three-coordinate signature for each specimen. Christian Mlinar's later work (2004 and 2017) extended the typology to cover the Hyksos and post-Hyksos production at Tell el-Dab'a and refined the dating windows for several back-type combinations. The atlas applies the combined Tufnell-Mlinar framework consistently across the corpus, with the Petrie (1925) Buttons and Design Scarabs typology cross-referenced where the older Petrie reading remains in circulation.
What the corpus actually counts.
| Period | Approx. dates | Specimens in corpus | Diagnostic features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Middle Kingdom | 2055 – 1650 BCE | 147 | simple design backs; geometric base designs |
| Second Intermediate Period | 1650 – 1550 BCE | 89 | Hyksos figural base designs; coil borders |
| New Kingdom (Eighteenth Dynasty) | 1550 – 1295 BCE | 134 | royal names; throne names; first cartouche-bordered designs |
| New Kingdom (Ramesside) | 1295 – 1069 BCE | 96 | Ramesside king lists; heart scarabs in faience |
| Third Intermediate Period | 1069 – 664 BCE | 72 | simplified backs; Bes and Pataikos figures |
| Late Period (to Persian conquest) | 664 – 525 BCE | 58 | Saite revival of Middle Kingdom forms |
Provenance — the corpus's hardest single problem.
Scarabs are small (most under 20 mm long), portable, and were produced in extraordinary quantities throughout dynastic Egypt — recent estimates suggest the surviving corpus runs into the tens of thousands of individual specimens across the world's museum collections, plus a comparable number in private hands. The combination of small size, large production and high antiquities-market value has made scarabs the single most-trafficked category of Egyptian material in the modern illicit market. The atlas's corpus excludes any specimen without a documented pre-1970 provenance, regardless of its typological interest; this rule alone has eliminated approximately one hundred and ninety candidate specimens from the working list over the past six years.
The five hundred and ninety-six specimens currently in the corpus are drawn from documented historical collections: the Petrie collection at UCL, the Newberry collection now distributed across several institutions, the Hilton Price collection (catalogued 1897 and the source of forty-one specimens in the corpus), the Brooklyn Museum's accessions of the 1930s, and several smaller European institutional collections including the Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim and the Leiden Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. Each specimen's provenance line documents the chain of custody from excavation or pre-1970 collection to the present location.
Faience as a material category.
The corpus distinguishes scarab material categories: glazed steatite (the largest category at three hundred and forty-eight specimens), faience (one hundred and eighty-one specimens, mostly Third Intermediate and Late Period), bone or ivory (twenty-nine specimens), hardstones such as carnelian, lapis lazuli and amethyst (twenty-eight specimens), and miscellaneous (gold, silver-set, glass — ten specimens). The material category is significant for dating: faience scarabs in particular shift in production technique and glaze chemistry across the periods in ways that the atlas's working group can sometimes date more tightly than the back-typology alone supports.
The Saite revival problem.
The Twenty-sixth Dynasty ('Saite' period, 664 – 525 BCE) revived Middle Kingdom scarab forms with such accuracy that distinguishing genuine Saite-period revivals from Middle Kingdom originals is a recurring attribution challenge. Anneke's working group has developed a set of diagnostic criteria for the Saite revival pieces — the slightly more elongated head proportions, the harder-edged carving of the back wings, the characteristic Saite faience glaze with its high copper content visible under photographic UV — and the corpus flags fifty-eight specimens with a clear Saite-revival attribution. Approximately thirty further specimens carry a 'Middle Kingdom or Saite revival' double attribution because the diagnostics in those cases do not converge.
The companion file on cylinder seals covers the parallel earlier seal-form. The attribution process sets out the working method. The corpus is updated quarterly; the next scheduled update is October 2026.