The tattoo more ancient in a mummy from 5,000 years ago
His remains appeared four years ago in the confines of Deir el Medina, a village of artisans and craftsmen located a stone’s throw from the Valley of the Kings. And since then, she had to beat the enigma of the mummy tattooed, with the aches and pains own of whoever endures 3,000 years underground. The tests to which it has been subjected just to shed the first light on a skeleton that must have belonged to a woman of the elite, or to a high official.
“The scientific studies and archaeological sites reveal that this is the mummy of a woman who probably lived between 1300 and 1070.C. and died when his age ranged between 25 and 34 years,” says Mustafa, the Waziri, secretary-general of the supreme council of Antiquities. Attached to your carcomida skin, is still visible about thirty tattoos that fields for neck, back, arms and shoulders.
The drawings depict bulls, sheep, baboons, lotus flowers and the eye of Horus (Udyat), a magical amulet and shield which symbolizes the order, which remains unperturbed. A symbolic universe carved on the body with an intention to establish prestige that, according to the egyptian authorities, “reflects the fact that the mummy belongs to a woman that enjoyed an important religious status throughout his life”.
class=”icon-foto_16_g”> Detail of the tattoos on one of his arms. MINISTRY OF EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES
The fascinating certainties of the case has a precedent earlier this year an investigation kept a record of a couple of skeletons, a man and a woman, that is exhibited from 1901 in the rooms of the British Museum. Both mummies, previous to the irruption of the pharaohs, were discovered at the end of the NINETEENTH century in Gebelein (the two mountains, in Arabic), a desert area about 40 kilometers from Thebes.
The finding of those tattoos was the most ancient evidence of tattooing in human beings in Africa, a millennium before the up to now considered as a pioneer. The couple studied, modified naturally by heat, salinity, and aridity of the desert, inhabited the current Egypt in a period that varies between 3351 and 3017.C. A stage predynastic to the happened the unification of the country under the baton of the first pharaoh. In the skeleton of the man appears a wild bull and a ram for a while that the woman has reasons linear and in the form of S.