DEATH IS NOT A SUBJECT one expects to find at the beginning of a book on dung beetles. The idea of someone's great-great granny wandering around with dead dung beetles dangling from her ears is equally strange, but the two subjects are not unrelated. The Victorians in their grand obsession with Egypt, death and loss shared a number of ideas with the ancient Egyptians from whom they took the association of dung beetles with death. The difference in the case of the Victorians was that they had a monotheistic religious template for death, which differed from the Egyptians’ rich animist pantheon of gods. Moreover, instead of wearing scarabs made out of stone, the Victorians frequently wore the real thing. Quite how the hapless beetles found themselves adorning the earlobes of respectable ladies is part of a story that began seven thousand years ago in Egypt, and which came full circle with the nineteenth-century invasion of Egypt by Napoléon and the subsequent development of Egyptomania. It was the two subjects of death and resurrection that made dung beetles so significant in ancient Egypt.

Although the family of dung beetles comes in a huge array of sizes, bizarre shapes and iridescent colours (with some so small you can barely see them) it is the smaller subfamily of true dung beetles that earned these insects their central role in Egypt. What made them so important to the Egyptians was their intimate relationship with dung, which promoted them to godliness. This makes the idea of dainty/fastidious Victorian women boldly wearing such creatures as ornaments seem even odder. The Victorians, however, viewed dung beetles and nature in general as a window onto the mystery of creation and as a distraction from the ugliness of industrial society, so perhaps they did not consider the faecal associations of their entomological jewellery too closely. The same cannot be said for the ancient Egyptians, who were very aware of the dung-rolling proclivities of the beetles. It is this improbable and intriguing relationship between an insect known for its relationship to ‘filth’ and the beliefs of one of the most enduring civilisations known to humankind that is our point of departure.