Scarabs, Sun Gods, And Gold: Inside Azza Fahmy’s New Obsession

cture, that tight triangle of scarab, sun, and protection, comes straight out of New Kingdom visual logic. You can almost see the original faience and gold on a museum mount behind it.

The Winged Scarab Cuff belongs to the same world. It reads like a wide band lifted from a royal funerary set, then opened and sharpened for a modern wrist. The design pulls from several sources at once: Tutankhamun, Psusennes I, scarab collections in the Petrie Museum and the British Museum, the Eye of Horus that guarded the body and the soul. All of that is distilled into one continuous surface of carved gold, wings, and oval forms. It has the presence of a relic and the scale of a contemporary statement piece.

Image Source: Press Office

Not every scarab here is monumental. Some are scaled down for daily life without losing their symbolic charge. The Shen Scarab Earrings wrap a small beetle inside the protective loop, that closed circle of time and safe passage. The Solar Voyage Chain uses repeating motifs of scarab and sun to trace the journey of Ra across the sky, but translated into a slender gold chain that sits like a quiet line of code at the collarbone.

There is play too. The Scarab Lattice Bracelet turns beetles into geometry, a linked grid where each scarab becomes a unit in a golden pattern. The Scarab Bangle is smooth and clean on the outside, while the inside hides motifs inspired by New Kingdom jewelry. The secret sits against the skin, exactly where ancient Egyptians believed power belonged.

For ring people, the collection reads like a miniature archaeology lesson on the hand. The Scarab Chevalier Ring is bold and flat, the kind of piece that catches the light in one swipe and announces the motif instantly. The Eye of Horus Scarab Ring layers two guardians at once, the beetle and the watching eye. Other rings sculpt wings and oval shells so that the finger carries what looks like a tiny pectoral from a burial chamber.

Necklaces continue this narrative. The Winged Scarab Necklace stretches a single scarab with outstretched wings across the collarbones, like a fragment from a royal broad collar. The Scarab Chain repeats the form all around the neck, more like a procession than a simple chain. Movement, renewal, and protection walk in a circle around the body.

Image Source: Press Office

Then there is the architecture. The Karnak Earrings and Karnak Ring echo the rhythm of the great temple colonnades, those forests of stone that still hold their own against the sky. Columns become vertical gold elements, punctuated by scarabs. The Winged Scarab Choker compresses one of the most powerful scenes in Egyptian iconography into a short, intense band: scarab, solar disc, wings, and Shen symbol all locked together in a compact story around the throat. It feels like wearing a strip of temple relief, translated into high jewelry.

What keeps the Scarab Collection from slipping into costume is the tension between scholarship and style. The references are precise. Tutankhamun’s treasure, Psusennes I, museum scarab trays that most people never see, amulets from the Late Period. All that research lives inside the lines, but the forms themselves are clean, wearable, and very much of now.

The scarab has always been about transformation. a small creature that rolls the sun into the next day, that protects the heart, that promises another dawn. In Azza Fahmy’s hands, it becomes a bridge between excavation sites and city streets, between dynasties and present tense. Gold remembers, and in this collection, it remembers in detail.