10k Beetle Scarab Brooch Pin

[travel_trader]

So this pin is pretty neat I have identified it have been made in the early 1900's. It is unmarked but tests to be 10k-12k. It weighs almost 6 grams. I know that in the early 1920's when they found King Tut's tomb the Egyptian revival sprung up. And some companies were setting real Egyptian artifacts in gold. Do you think this is a real Egyptian artifact? It measures 25mm by 20mm.And if it is real what do you think the value is?

[kpamber]

This is just a guess on my part.  Totally a guess...

The scarab beetle looks to be made of  faience.  You see alot of Egyptian revival pieces that are made from faience, but they are manufactured specifically for that purpose.  I really don't think that the beetle is ancient or from a tomb, but that is just based on logic since the whole Egyptian revival period was huge...people decorated floors of their homes in Egyptian revival look, and it was manufactured because of the Tut's tomb finding...

Egypt itself became a huge tourist mecca, and people bought up souvenirs in the markets...still do...but they were of modern manufacture.  Very very few actual pieces from the tomb were smuggled out...I think that Lord Carnarvon, who funded the expedition, died shortly after the find, and Howard Carter, who found the tomb, spent many years cataloguing the finds. 

Also, I wonder, looking at the frame, if it actually didn't hold something else originally...the style is not what you would typically think of  for a scarab, more for a cameo of the era. 

Of course, you can easily get modern faience scarab beads and many of them have the heiroglyphs on the bottom as well. 

But, I could be totally wrong!

[rubiano98]

Interesting, because I just finished a novel based on the find. Fiction based on fact, told from the memory of a 93 year old woman who was on the scene as a child. Great book, btw. The Tut mania, the trinkets sold to the tens of thousands of tourists that visited the site in the 1920s (Carnarvon died in the earlier part of 1923). Almost all the trinkets were new. The book suggested that Carter & Carnarvon picked up piecs here and there and walked away with them in their pockets. I imagine they did - who could resist? All you say is true and I feel like I just read the same thing in the book. Which I did.

I have this Tut-Egypt theme going through my life right now, for some reason. Just read last week about Tut's beard on his mask coming off during a cleaning and being glued back on with SuperGlue. Plus the glue got on other parts of his mask.

Well, enough OT.