When Bliss and Macalister found 30 scarabs with the names of Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, and other pharaohs in a level they recognized as belonging to the Israelite settlement at Tel es-Safi, the ancient site of the Philistine city of Gath, they wrote:
"Evidently some of them, if not all, are mere Palestinian imitations of imported specimens, and are therefore of no value in fixing the date of associated objects. It is an elementary archaeological canon that under the most favorable circumstances scarabs alone can give a measure of date only; when the element of copying, perhaps long subsequent to the engraving of the original exemplar, is introduced, their chronological importance practically disappears." [F.J. Bliss and R.A.S. Macalister, `Excavations in Palestine (1898-1900) (London, 1902), p. 152; I. Velikovsky, `Ramses II and His Time', p. 237]
From a private e-mail list we obtained this information:
"One would say that if the Egyptology and sensationalism go hand in hand, it is mostly at the expense of Egyptology. In 1978, during the excavation of the central grave of a mound at Trnjaci-Pilatovici, inter alia, the scarab of greenish-glazed steatite was found. The Iron Age mound can be dated ca.550-520 B.C.
The scarab is 2,6 x 1,7 x 1,1 cm, with longitudinal perforation. The flat underside of the scarab is decorated with a representation of a scarab beetle (seen from above) flanked with two cobra snakes (heads pointed toward the central scarab) with a crocodile (seen in a side view) below all the three (according to J.L de Cervival, the scarab itself is perhaps to be dated ca. Dyn. XX-XXII). The scarab, an authentic Egyptian piece, was probably brought there by the enterprising Greek merchants. We can only guess how and where a merchant obtained it. Frankly, I doubt that the "customer" or even merchant himself had any idea about what the scarab really was. The grave mound owner was a local cattle-breeder Iron Age "prince". [See image for scarab of similar design using different figures but underlined by a crocodile from Naucratis. E.A.Gardner, `Naucratis', Part II, The Egypt Exploration Fund] Present Pilatovici village is close to Uzicka Pozega, town in southwestern Serbia. There were about 30 mounds known in the area until the 1940s."As the reader can see even when contemporary artifacts are found together modern, conventionally trained individuals explain it away, thus robbing themselves of great historical insights and nullifying the possibility of reform in chronology. In our view the dating of that scarab is more likely 22nd or else 21st Dynasty (19th Dynasty?) and that is how it came to be in a roughly contemporary grave mound of the late 6th century BC since we must allow time, but hardly hundreds of years, for the piece to get to its final destination.
Such modern made assumptions are a root cause for erroneous thinking among archaeologists we believe. Scarabs were used for official purposes to designate ownership or origin of products such as oil or wine shipments. Sometimes they were used as weights and in legal causes. Scarabs were the presents of pharaohs; they were the official seal of the reigning monarch used in Egypt itself as well as in dependent countries. The scarabs mentioned above do not differ in any way from those found in Egypt as to workmanship and appearance. To call them imitations is an attempt to get around the otherwise anachronistic implication they impose on the darling of archaeologists and historians, conventional chronology. Their simplest and most straight forward interpretation (Occam's Razzor effect), is that these pharaohs in reality belong to the time in which theses mute witnesses were found in situ as the revision here defended has shown over and over again. We believe the eloquent Serbian example confirms once again that scarabs where put into graves as time clocks but are explained away presumably as collected artifacts merely placed there because of sentimental value.
Conventionally bound scholars have at other times held, that, rather than following a convoluted line of reasoning in analyzing issues of chronological importance, the simplest explanation is usually the best. In this case the simplest explanation was that these scarabs belong into the Israelite layers in which they were found.
A collection of scarabs found in Israel was published in about 1936, Alan Rowe, A Catalogue of Egyptian Scarabs, Scarabäoids, Seals and Amulets in the Palestine Archaeological Museum, Le Cairo, 1936. [M. Pieper, `Skarabäen aus Palästina', in Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache, Band 76, p. 54]
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