FOOTNOTES:

[110] _Collections d'Antiquites Egypt. au Caire_, p. 1 _et seq._

[111] Thebes; its Tombs and their Tenants, ancient and modern. London,
1862.

[112] _Ibid._, pp. 253-255. Comp. Gliddon, Indigenous Races, p. 192
note.

IX.

PHOENICIAN SCARABS. MANUFACTURED MOSTLY AS ARTICLE OF TRADE.
USED INSCRIBED SCARABS AS SEALS IN COMMERCIAL AND OTHER
TRANSACTIONS. MANY SCARABS FOUND IN SARDINIA.

Archaeologists frequently find in lands bordering on the shores of the
Mediterranean sea, scarabs and scarabeoids, on which are engraved
subjects which are Egyptian, Chaldean, Assyrian, Hittite or Persian;
they were intended apparently to be used as signets, and were incised
with short inscriptions in Phoenician, and sometimes, in Aramaic or in
Hebrew, giving the name of the owner of the signet.

These had been mostly manufactured in their entirety, as articles of
trade, for sale by the ancient merchants of Tyre and Sidon, or they
were Egyptian, Assyrian or other originals upon which, Phoenician
lapidaries had engraved the name of the later Phoenician owner. In
spite of not being an artistic people producing works of originality,
this people, the great mariners and merchants of antiquity, had in an
eminent degree the genius of assimilation or adaptation, and
manufactured cylinders, cones, spheroids, scarabs and signets of all
kinds, at first for themselves, and afterwards as an article of sale
to the people with whom they traded.

They also used seals in their commercial and maritime transactions,
which they surrounded with the same formalities which we find in
Assyria, Babylonia and Chaldea. When they dealt with these last
mentioned peoples, the Phoenicians came into contact with nations,
whose most unimportant transactions were put into writing by a scribe,
and sealed in the presence of witnesses, with the seal of the
contracting parties. They therefore in dealing with these people were
obliged to have and use signets.[113][114] Such contracts have been
found dating between 745-729 B.C.

In the island of Sardinia have been found numerous intaglios under the
form of scarabs, they were apparently used as signets. The under parts
are incised with Egyptian, Assyro-Chaldean or Persian subjects. In the
necropolis of Tharros, an early Phoenician colony situated near the
present Torre di San Giovanni di Sinis, have been found more than 600
scarabs ornamented with Egyptian, Assyrian and Persian subject