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People Illustrated: In antiquity, tattoos could beautify, shock, or humiliate

Scythian  Tattoo - from WikicommonsPeople Illustrated: In antiquity, tattoos could beautify, shock, or humiliate

By Adrienne Mayor

Archaeology (March-April 1999)

Abstract: For centuries, humans have used tattoos for myriad reasons–for magical protection, to relieve pain, for vengeance, or to declare victory over an enemy. Tattoos could beautify, shock, or humiliate. They proclaimed valor, religious belief, group solidarity, or personal independence, their messages hidden or in plain sight. A legal inscription from Ephesus indicates that during the early Roman Empire all slaves exported to Asia were tattooed with the words “tax paid.” “Stop me, I’m a runaway” was another standard motto etched on the brows of Roman slaves. New research indicates that Roman authorities punished early Christians with forehead tattoos that condemned them to the mines. In A.D. 330, the first Christian emperor, Constantine, banned the practice of tattooing the faces of convicts, gladiators, and soldiers. Because the human face reflected “the image of divine beauty,” he said, “it should not be defiled.” Despite misgivings about the practice, the Greeks were fascinated by the idea of tattoos as exotic beauty marks. In the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., a series of popular vase paintings illustrated the murder of the musician Orpheus by tattooed Thracian maenads wielding spears, daggers, and axes. Ötzi the Iceman, who died in an Alpine blizzard some 5,000 years ago, has several tattoos, concentrated at joints: parallel lines on the right foot and ankle, bars along the lower spine, lines on the left calf, and crosses inside the right knee and left ankle. X-rays revealed chronic degeneration of bone and cartilage in the spine and arthritic wear and tear of the knees and ankles, suggesting the practice of the ancient folk remedy of tattooing to relieve pain.



Introduction: I will tattoo you with pictures of the terrible punishments suffered by the most notorious sinners in Hades! I will tattoo you with the white-tusked boar!

Violent imargery promisign gruesome harm to rivals or faithless lovers is common in Hellenistic curses, but the above poem stands out because it threatens revenge by tattoo. The author of this curse on Egyptian papyrus fragments discovered in 1962 and 1991, is unknown, but a strong candidate is the poetess Moiro of Byzantium, who lived ca. 300 B.C. A like punishment turns up about the same time in a scene by the Greek playwright Herodas. In The Jealous Woman, the scorned Bitinna summons Kosis, a professional tattooer of slaves, criminals, and prisoners of war, to bring his needles to punish her unfaithful slave-lover.

While today tattoos are primarily decorative, in antiquity they also had punitive, magical, and medical functions. In Greece, the use of penal tattoos was probably introduced from Persia in the sixth century B.C. According to the historian Herodotus, the Persian king Xerxes, on his way to invade Greece (480 B.C.) , was so infuriated when the sea swept away his bridge at Hellespont that he ordered his soldiers to enslave the disobedient body of water by tossing iron fetters into the sea. Then he ha men flog it with 300 lashes. “I even heard,” writes an amused Herodotus, “that Xerxes commanded his royal tattooers to tattoo the water!”

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