• DOI:10.1038/nature.2016.19864
• Corpus ID: 4465165

Intricate animal and flower tattoos found on Egyptian mummy

@article{Watson2016IntricateAA,
  title={Intricate animal and flower tattoos found on Egyptian mummy},
  author={Traci Watson},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2016},
  volume={533},
  pages={155-155}
}

• T. Watson
• Published 12 May 2016
• History
• Nature

A mummy from ancient Egypt was heavily tattooed with sacred symbols, which may have served to advertise and enhance the religious powers of the woman who received them more than 3,000 years ago. The tattoos are the first found on a mummy from dynastic Egypt to show actual objects, among them lotus blossoms on the mummy’s hips, cows on her arm and baboons on her neck. Just a few other ancient Egyptian mummies sport tattoos, and those are merely patterns of dots or dashes. Especially prominent among the mummy’s tattoos are ‘wadjet eyes’: possible symbols of protection against evil that adorn the mummy’s neck, shoulders and back. “Any angle that you look at this woman, you see a pair of divine eyes looking back at you,” says bioarchaeologist Anne Austin of Stanford University in California, who presented the findings last month at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Atlanta, Georgia. Austin noticed the tattoos while examining mummies for the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, which conducts research at Deir el-Medina, a village once home to the ancient artisans who worked on tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. Looking at a headless, armless torso dating from 1300 bc to 1070 bc, Austin noticed markings on the neck. She soon realized that they were tattoos. Austin knew of tattoos discovered on other mummies using infrared imaging (M. Samadelli et al. J. Cult. Herit. 16, 753–758; 2015), which peers more deeply into the skin than visible-light imaging. With help from infrared lighting and an infrared sensor, she determined that the Deir el-Medina mummy boasts more than 30 tattoos, including some on skin so darkened by the resins used in mummification that they were invisible to the eye. Austin and Cédric Gobeil, director of the French project at Deir el-Medina, digitally stretched the images to counter distortion from the mummy’s shrunken skin. The tattoos identified so far carry powerful religious significance. Many, such as the cows, are associated with the goddess Hathor, one of the most prominent deities in ancient Egypt. The symbols on the throat and arms may have been intended to give the woman a jolt of magical power as she sang or played music during rituals for Hathor. The tattoos may also be a public expression of the woman’s piety, says Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute in Illinois. “We didn’t know about this sort of expression before,” Teeter says, adding that she and other Egyptologists were “dumbfounded” when they heard of the finding. Austin has already discovered three more tattooed mummies at Deir el-Medina, and hopes that modern techniques will uncover more elsewhere. ■ A R C H A E O L O G Y