Evidence for tattooing in the ancient Nile Valley is growing. Although testimonies are still patchy for some of the earlier periods, a continuous tradition stretching from the Predynastic Period into the New Kingdom can be traced in Egypt, while in Nubia tattooing continued into the Christian Period and beyond.
Above & below: A flute player with tattoos of Bes, depicted on a wall painting from a Nineteenth Dynasty house at Deir el-Medina. Image: Renée Friedman (RF) after a watercolour by J M T Vandier d’Abbadie (1938)
Tattooing in the New Kingdom
In the New Kingdom, we can draw on multiple lines of evidence for tattooing. These include actual human remains, depictions of marked females on house and tomb walls, cosmetic equipment, drinking bowls, ostraca, and figurines. All of these combine to create a compelling picture of the use of tattoos and the people who bore them, at least within the village of the royal tomb-builders at Deir el-Medina in Thebes. It is also here that tattooing is most explicitly associated with performance. The most prominent indicators are several drawings of nude or semi-clad women and girls engaged in making music and dancing, who have tattooed images presumably of the dwarf god Bes placed on their outer thighs.
Three-dimensional depictions of women with the same tattoos (in the form of figurines and handles for mirrors and cosmetic spoons) show a geometric band along the base of the lower back, too. This corresponds with remarkable precision in placement and content to actual tattoos only recently found on the remains of two women from this village.
Novel words