Loading ...INK-REDIBLE Ancient Tattoos Depicting ‘Magical’ Animals and Gods Found on Female Egyptian Mummies
SOURCE: THE SUN
BY: HARRY PETTIT
TATTOOS depicting animals, gods and floral patterns have been found “hidden” on 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies.
The ancient body art, found on seven female mummies, may help shed light on why the Egyptians got inked.
Prior to the new discovery, tattoos had only been found on six mummies over more than a century of research at ancient sites in Egypt.
“When I first saw [the tattoos], I felt both the thrill of discovery and the magic of this new technology,” archaeologist Dr Anne Austin told Fox News.
Dr Austin and her team at the University of Missouri-St. Louis studied 12 mummies dating as far back as around 1000 BC.
They were found in 2017 at a site known as Deir el-Medina in eastern Egypt.
However, their ink remained hidden for years, either under papyrus or due to the dark colour of the heavily embalmed skin.
Experts only discovered them after using infrared scanning technology to peer at the ancient markings.
“It’s quite magical to be working in an ancient tomb and suddenly see tattoos on a mummified person using infrared photography,” Dr Austin said.
Designs and placement of the tattoos varied greatly across the mummies.
As well as animals and gods, images of crosses and human eyes were found – an Ancient Egyptian symbol associated with protection.
Little is known about why the markings were important to the Egyptians.
“Everything about the new tattoo discoveries is surprising because so little is known about this ancient Egyptian practice,” Egyptologist Kerry Muhlestein of Brigham Young University told Science News.
The research was presented at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.
The oldest tattoos were once thought to belong to a South American Chinchorro mummy who had a moustache-like design inked on his face.
It was initially thought he died in 4,000BC but in 2015 researchers found he is in fact younger than 5,200-year-old frozen mummy Ötzi the Iceman.
Ötzi was found by walkers preserved in a glacier on the Italy-Austria border in 1991.
High-tech scans revealed a total of 61 tattoos: Geometric designs of dots, crosses and parallel lines.
Ötzi would have done lots of walking im the Alps and it is thought the tattoos may have been a kind of acupuncture to ease joint pains.
There is evidence of tattooing on mummies found in the Taklamakan Desert in China dating from 1,200 BC.
Modern tattoos of the kind sported by David Beckham are thought to have developed in Polynesian cultures over centuries.
The name comes from the phrase tatatau, meaning to hit or strike, which the British sailor James Cook heard when he reached Tahiti in 1769.