Besides scarabaei, other forms of seals are met with in Egypt. Many of them have little models of men or animals on the back, as human-heads, symbolic eyes, hippopotami, lions, hedgehogs, ducks, fish, frogs, flies, crocodiles; while not a few are shaped like cowries.
A large number are also cut in geometrical forms, tablet-shaped, squares, rectangles, ovals, cubes, and cones. Like the scarabs, they are all pierced, through their long axis or diameter, with a narrow cylindrical hole, and were similarly mounted.
The specimen illustrated in fig. 83, now in the MacGregor Collection, bears a private name upon the base. The material is steatite, beautifully carved. The figure is that of a male, squatting in the familiar attitude, his hands upon his knees, and wearing a full wig. The date is late in the Twelfth Dynasty. Fig. 84 is another illustration of the same motive, dating from the Eighteenth Dynasty.
Animal forms are illustrated in the figs. 85, 86, 87, 88, 89. The first represents a naturalistic group, a cow suckling its calf, exquisitely cut in steatite. It is in the collection of Captain Timmins in Cairo. The design upon the base is analogous in its symmetry and the devices employed to the steatite stamp, fig. 94, in the same collection, which probably dates from about the Eleventh Dynasty. The two stamps, figs. 86 and 87, are very important, one of them being dated by the cartouche of Mentuhetep of the Eleventh Dynasty, the other by its analogy, and by the device of a running figure in line frequently employed upon the button-seals (fig. 42, and _cf._ fig. 28). Hornets are employed upon the Karnak three-sided seal, fig. 86, which is probably of earlier date, about the close of the Sixth Dynasty. A further example of this [Sidenote: Miscellaneous devices.] character, being a ram with horns, is in the MacGregor Collection: upon the base is an interesting pattern in coils, dating probably from the end of the Twelfth Dynasty. A great number of seals with cats (fig. 88), hedgehogs, hippopotami (fig. 89), and fish (fig. 90), date from the time of Thothmes III in the Eighteenth Dynasty, while those with ducks (figs. 91, 92), frogs, and flies, seem to be slightly later, dating from the reign of Amenhetep III.