Tattoo History - Pharaohs
Pharaohs
Designs on figures made of stone dating back to 4.000 before Christ proof in Egypt, which highly affected the European spirit world through the symbiosis of their own genius with Greeks, the art of tatauing was very common. Mainly high ranked executives, priests and of course the pharaohs were decorated this way. During the middle empire, from about 2040 - 1710 B.C., prick drawings were a popular ritual like two Egyptian mummies proof which derive from the time around 2160 to 1994 B.C. The motives, lent by the Nubians, were an assembly of abstract points and lines in blue-black color and should assure the dead fertility in the beyond and birds on the temples or on the eyebrows should save the wearer from the evil gaze.
The 4.000 year old mummy of the Egyptian priest Amunet shows tataus proclaiming her special spiritual connection with the beyond. With the tataus, so the believe of the Egyptians, the strengths of the diseased could be brought back to life and the openings in the skin enabled the access to the soul of the tataued. The body of the nearly 5.000 years old mummy of the royal harem woman Ament, which is kept in the Egyptian museum in Kairo, also possesses images on the skin and the wife of Ramses II, who ruled from 1.300 to 1.237 B.C., was wearing marks on her forearms. In the January of 1923 the interest on Tutenchamuns tomb was displaced by the discovery of a tataued princess in a crypt near Luxor. The royal lady was one of the beauties of the eleventh dynasty which was blooming 2.000 B.C.
Tattoos have become very rare in egypt nowadays. Due to the close location to the near east the allotment of Islamic fundamentalists is very high. About 90 percent of the 58 residents of Egypt are Moslems whose holy scriptures, the Koran, prohibit tattooing emphatically.
Know your history better than we do? Then let us know and e-mail us any additions you might have. If you know about an important event or a person influencing tattoo history that we missed out on... we wanna know about it too!
