The Bluffer’s Guide to Ancient Egyptian Amulets

Introduction – What are amulets?

An amulet, very simply, is a object that is said to magically protect its owner from harm. But unless you’re pagan, very keen on folk superstitions or an avid Dungeons and Dragons player you’ll probably not be overly familiar with them. Today the closest most people get to an amulet is a religious symbol such as a crucifix or a lucky charm, such as a four-leaved clover, and these two examples are useful because they show just how varied amulets can be. In ancient Egypt, amulets could be almost anything, from a simple piece of knotted chord to an elaborately carved pendant.

Unlike a lucky charm, however, Egyptian amulets were usually for a very specific purpose; there were, for instance, amulets to protect expectant mothers in childbirth or to ensure the spirit of a dead person didn’t lose their heart. If you’ve ever played any RPG computer games, you’ll probably have come across in-game amulets that give +1 resistance against electricity or spells or men wearing orange socks. Well, ancient Egyptian amulets, weird as it may seem, worked in a similar way: having a certain amulet on your person could be the difference between survival and destruction, particularly in the afterlife.

Amulets are particular interesting if you’re looking at ancient Egypt. We know comparatively little about Egyptian religion, so amulets that survive tell us a lot about the everyday beliefs of ordinary Egyptians; what they were afraid of, what dangers they faced and what they valued. It’s also worth pointing out that in Egypt everything could have amuletic qualities: every piece of art seems to have had some sort of magical aspect. We know that the Egyptians considered statues and images of a person to actually be that person (that’s why certain unpopular kings’ statues and images were destroyed and removed; it’s not just removing their memory but removing them). There’s certainly a big cross over between amulets and images/statues left in tombs, but that’s another article for another day.

The Egyptians themselves had at least four words that could refer to amulets: sa, nehet and meket which all derive from words meaning “to guard” or “protect”, and wedja meaning “well being”. The sheer number of different words they had for them, quite apart from the words for individual types of amulet, shows just how important they were.