gems, glyptic, engraved gems, agate, cameo, intaglio

The scarabs were found on the island of Ibiza. The Egyptian-style scarabs proper have been thoroughly published by Lorenzo Baqués Estapé in Ampurias 36 (1974), pp. 87–146. Most of these scarabs come from the necropolis of Puig des Molins in the city of Ibiza, and the complicated history of the excavations at this site and others on the island has been well summarized by M. Tarradell and M. Font in the first chapter of Eivissa Cartaginesa (Barcelona, 1975). The director of the Archaeological Museum of Ibiza, Jorge H. Fernández, kindly contributed to this work with a study of the Ibizan sites where scarabs were found (see below, Chapter 1, Section 6). The earlier excavations were irregular and poorly documented. The numismatist A. Vives y Escudero assembled a large collection of antiquities from Puig des Molins which, including other scarabs from the same origin, he published in 1917 (currently, three are in Barcelona, two in the Moreno Collection, one in New York, four in Boston, and the whereabouts of twenty-three are unknown). Today, the Vives collection is housed in the Archaeological Museum of Madrid. Other sites supplied the Archaeological Museum of Barcelona with a comparable, though smaller, collection; some of these scarabs were published in 1944, while the rest remain unpublished. Many scarabs of the type under discussion likely remain in private hands—those known include examples in the collection of General Moreno in Madrid, one given to General Franco in 1955, and one in the Cau Ferrat Museum in Sitges. Others, of unknown location, are known through publications by Pérez-Cabrero, who also had a collection of his own.