Egyptian scarab found in Kariong, NSW, Australia

[nick_f]

Hi All,

I went today (23-May-09) with a friend with our metal detectors in Kariong, NSW, off Woy Woy Road. Our main target was the remains of an old farm. The place was infested with iron and tall grass, and we couldn't find anything of value, only heaps of rusty iron from a discarded water tank. But after that, my friend had the idea to go to a place where somebody has drawn a lot of hieroglyphs on the stone walls. Although the date of the drawings is unknown, some people believe they date from around 1920. So we decided to see if we find some coins in the area, considering there have been many visitors in the area since the drawings have been discovered.
We found three coins. A 50 cent piece, a 20 cent piece and a 10 cent piece. I got the 20 cents coin, from 1972.
But more importantly, we found a pendant, with an image of an egyptian scarab and some weird writing on the back of it. We also found in the same place a tiny black stone, very smooth.
At the end of the day me and my friend split the treasures. I got the scarab pendant and he got the black stone. The scarab seems to be made of some dark gray metal like lead, but it is not as heavy as lead. I did some search on the internet for similar images of pendants but I couldn't find any other ones identical.
I would appreciate if somebody can give me some indications about the text written on the back of the pendant.

For some photos of the inscriptions on the stone walls, you can check these web sites: http://www.valeriebarrow.com/album2/index.html

http://www.subversiveelement.com/His...oglyphics.html


Regards,
Nicolae

[Tinkerer]

Nicolae,

bet you had a great day.
Interesting finds.

Tinkerer

[nick_f]

Originally Posted by Tinkerer

Nicolae,

bet you had a great day.
Interesting finds.

Tinkerer

Yes, we had a great time, especially after we started finding the coins
I could compare the performance of my Hammerhead detector with a commercial VLF one (Micronta Discovery 2).

My one is more insensitive to the hot rocks, and it has the big advantage of not requiring the ground balancing. My friend has no experience with his metal detector and initially he was very dissapointing comparing the performances of our detectors.
Anyway, I noticed that the ground balancing decreases the sensitivity of his detector quite a lot.
The pinpointing is better on his (concentric coil), but we had some funny experiences. We found some targets on the ground, isolated the soil with the sample and when scanning the soil in front of his coil, we couldn't find the samples!
After a while, I realised that because of the ground balancing, the samples were not seen. So I told him to do a ground balance with the coil high in the air, and after that we could isolate the targets. The HH has better depth anyway, something like double the distance or even more in some cases.

We found some unknown pieces of metal (doesn't rust, is attracted by magnet, color silver and copper) and we were very pleased to see their small size didn't prevent the detectors from finding them. My detector can see the piece from the image from about 7 cm distance, not on the centre of the coil, but near the coil.


Regards,
Nicolae