Author: John and Colleen Darnell / Source: Atlas Obscura
The average inhabitant of the modern world—frequenting both museums and the cinema—has come to expect a number of things of the preserved bodies of the ancient Egyptians: bandages, amulets, perhaps a funerary mask, dried skin, and sometimes both a malevolent disposition and an uncanny talent for moving slowly yet managing to surprise an often well-armed and presumably fleet-footed human quarry.
Lacking in all realistic Egyptian details, the most recent reboot of The Mummy (2017) inadvertently captured a feature that is indeed present on some (sadly immobile) mummies: tattoos. Tattooed priestesses were a reality in ancient Egyptian temples, and a new study of two ancient Egyptian bodies in the British Museum confirms that this practice (for men as well as women) began over 5,000 years ago. Even more remarkably, these newly discovered oldest figural tattoos reveal that the ancient Egyptians got inked for many of the same reasons as people do today.
For the past 100 years, a male Egyptian body on display in the British Museum has been an icon of modern perceptions of early society near the banks of the Nile River. This earliest phase of ancient Egypt is called “Predynastic,” because it predates the unification of Egypt in the First Dynasty, which occurred about 3100 B.C. The Predynastic man on display in London arrived (with assistance) at the British Museum at the turn of the last century and was accessioned in 1900 together with five other bodies that likely originated in southern Egypt (probably the site of Gebelein).
Radiocarbon dating—as well as other clues—suggest that the bodies date to the period between 3400 to 3100 B.C. He and his compatriots are not actually mummies, in the sense of an embalmed and wrapped corpse (the kind that get reanimated by the Scroll of Thoth and/or tana leaves in modern cinematic imaginings), but naturally mummified bodies. The sand in which they were buried dried the corpses, preserving them extraordinarily well, so well that their skin and hair are largely intact. What had escaped attention until a recent recording of the “mummies” with infrared photography is that two of the bodies—the famous Predynastic man and a contemporaneous woman—sported tattoos.
Snarling beasts and noble creatures have been popular motifs in tattoos across wide expanses of time and space, and the Predynastic Egyptian man was no different: he chose a barbary sheep and a bull for his upper right arm. While a sheep might not seem particularly fierce, bagging a barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia) with just a bow and arrow—or more likely trapping one, considering the speed and precipice climbing abilities of the animals—was the ultimate in ancient Egyptian big game hunting. The bull is a more obvious symbol of power, and one that would later serve as an important icon of royal authority in Egypt. The woman has two tattoos on her upper right arm and shoulder: a vertical line with…
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