Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 49 (3) 2021   doi:10.17746/1563-0110.2021.49.3.051-059

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Scarab Amulet-Beads from 1st–2nd Century Children’s Burials
at a Necropolis on the Iluraton Plateau, Eastern Crimea

M.O. Tarasenko¹ and Z.V. Khanutina²

¹Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Hrushevskoho 4, Kyiv, 01001, Ukraine

²State Museum of the History of Religion, Pochtamtskaya 14, St. Petersburg, 190000, Russia

We describe a group of Egyptian faience scarabs unearthed from the necropolis on the Iluraton Plateau, Eastern Crimea, by the expedition from the State Museum of the History of Religion (St. Petersburg) in 1987-1990. Artifacts made of so-called Egyptian faience were found in eight of the sixty-two burials—those of girls aged below 1.5, dating to the 1st to early 2nd centuries AD. The most numerous among the faience items were beads in the form of scarabs. The analysis shows them to fall into three groups in terms of presence and nature of images on the reverse side: those without images (3 spec.), those with abstract images (3 spec.), and those with anthropo-zoomorphic images (2 spec.). In two cases, representations point to specific Egyptian workshops. Scarabs in girls’ burials of the Roman period elaborate on the thanatological imagery, which originated among the Scythian-Saka tribes of Eurasia in the mid-1st millennium BC.

Keywords: Necropolis, Iluraton Plateau, children’s burials, Egyptian faience, amulets, scarabs