Scarabaeus

skar-a-be'us, a tumblebug held sacred by the Egyptians. None might injure it. In the ball of dung which the beetle rolls from morn till night, the Egyptians are said to have recognized an emblem of the globe. If this be true, their ideas of the shape of the world were centuries in advance of Christian Europe. The beetle itself personified the sun, the sharp projections on the head being rays of light and the thirty segments of its six feet (tarsi) represented the thirty days of the month. In hieroglyphics, a picture of the scarabaeus was used to represent the verb to be. Its figure was imitated in sculpture and its dead body was hung about the neck as an ornament.