As technology advances, scientists, archaeologists, and researchers are discovering new fascinating facts about the past. Infrared photography has helped illuminate tattoos on seven mummified ancient Egyptians that until now had gone unnoticed. The mummies dated back to at least 3,000 years ago and were found at a site called Deir el-Medina.
However, it’s no surprise that the ancient Egyptians were designing their bodies with tattoos, given that they decorated nearly every available surface they could find. Why end at furniture, jewelry, statues, temples, and tombs?
In November 2019, Anne Austin, an archaeologist from the University of Missouri, St. Louis, presented research on the seven tattooed mummies at the annual conference of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The mummies, still-unidentified, were most likely craft workers and artisans who helped decorate and construct the elaborate tombs found in a valley nearby the Kings and Valley of the Queens.
Tattooing in ancient Egypt is poorly understood, as the civilization left barley any record of the practice behind. The only other record found before the Deir el-Medina, are six other Egyptian mummies with tattoos, of which 5 were female and one male.
In 2016, Austin first noticed the tattoos while she was in Cairo studying the Deir el-Medina mummies at the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology. The archaeologist saw markings on the neck bone of an armless, headless torso, and suspected it to be painted on. However, after Austin examined the designs closer, she realized they were tattoos. Eventually, with the help of infrared light, she found 30 individual symbols. Most of the tattoos are invisible to the naked eye because of resins used in the mummification process.
Austin said:
It’s quite magical to be working in an ancient tomb and suddenly see tattoos on a mummified person using infrared photography.
It’s unknown what the significance of tattoos is to the ancient Egyptians. Previous theories thought tattoos connoted sexuality and fertility. However, all the tattoos found on women mummies at Deir el-Medina showed a trend and an array of markings that suggest the body art may be associated with their roles as healers and priestesses.
One of the female mummies that Austin assessed has tattoos of hieroglyphs used in ancient Egyptian writing and cross patterns on her arms, which don’t appear on any of the other dozen tattooed mummies. Austin suspects that since this woman has a significant amount of body markings, she may have played an important religious role in ancient Egyptian society.
Another female from Deir el-Medina has a human eye tattooed on her neck with a seated baboon on each side of her neck. The human eye is an Egyptian symbol associated with protection. “I see no discernible pattern in the tattoos we’ve found so far,” Austin added.
A separate group of researchers found tattoos on a pair of 5,000-year-old Egyptian mummies in 2018. For over 100 years, the couple (one male, one female) had been housed in the British Museum’s mummy collection by the time the tattoos finally were discovered. On the 18-to 21-year old male who was killed by a stab in the back, infrared scans revealed an image of a Barbary sheep and bull on his shoulder. On the female, a sequence of “S” shapes was on her upper shoulder.
Before the 2018 find, Ötzi the Iceman’s 5,250-year-old body was discovered in the Italian Alps. The Iceman is the world’s oldest known tattooed individual, with geometrical markings rather than figurative. However, it’s believed that tattooing goes much farther back than either the Egyptian mummies or the Iceman.
If researchers could find more tattoos on additional Egyptian mummies, it could help them figure out what the markings represent.
