Ancient African civilisation was always in tune with its environment. Tribes from Cape to Cairo recognise some sort of fauna and flora in their religious practices. Today we will focus on an invertebrate that has risen to a Godly status and how it has come to be associated with such an esteemed role.

With summer in full swing, the buzz of dung beetles echoes through the bushveld. As comical as they seem when going about scrambling over freshly rolled dung balls, in ancient Egypt they were highly regarded creatures. The Egyptian scarab is one the most recognised symbols in ancient Egypt, appearing as amulets, in hieroglyphs, on jewellery, in funerary context and even featured in movies like The Mummy!

As one their many rituals they use to honour death, Egyptians would remove the deceased’s heart and replace it with a stone amulet of a dung beetle; Kheper. This represented rising from nothing. They believed the dung beetles too have the ability to spontaneously recreate themselves from piles of dung and that all beetles were males that had been rebirthed directly from the soil they were buried in, which was just a misunderstanding of their reproductive process. In fact, the male digs the hole in which he will bury his ball of dung. The female then lays a single egg in the brood ball, only then is the ball buried. The outer shell of the ball hardens to keep the inside moist, ideal conditions for the larva to develop and will then consume the rest of the ball. Only then will they emerge from the ground they were buried in to repeat the cycle. This analogy by the ancient Egyptians is the reason the dung beetle was a powerful symbol of the renewal and the rebirth that was hoped for after death in the afterlife.

The ancient Egyptians also associated dung beetles with the life-giving Sun. This was because of the way the beetles diligently rolled the dung balls across the land emulating the Sun’s movement across the sky from east to west. This analogy linked with its assumed regenerative powers led the dung beetle to be associated with the daily birth of the Sun, personified as the god of the morning sun, Khepri.

This is how this lowly creature rose to godly status and was revered, justifiably so, in Egyptian mythology.

Blog by Andries Ndlovu (Bush Lodge Ranger)