Northern Cal. Egyptology Lecture Oct. 11: Revealing the Practice of Tattooing in Ancient Egypt

The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California Chapter, and the Near Eastern Studies Department, University of California, Berkeley, invite you to attend a virtual lecture by Dr. Anne Austin, University of Missouri-St. Louis:

Revealing the Practice of Tattooing in Ancient Egypt Zoom Lecture for ARCE-NC members only. When: Sunday, October 11, 2020, 3 PM     The tattoo on the neck of this mummy means "to do good" in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and might have symbolically given its power to her voice when she sang or spoke. (Photo provided by Anne Austin for the University of Missouri-St. Louis Daily)         About the Lecture: The practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt is rarely attested. Egyptologists have identified tattoos on only a handful of mummies spanning Pharaonic Egypt's more than 3,000 year history. Textual evidence is virtually silent on the practice and art historical evidence is often ambiguous. In 2014, the mission of the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale (IFAO) made an incredible find--an extensively tattooed mummy from the necropolis at Deir el-Medina, the community of the workmen who cut and decorated the New Kingdom's royal tombs. With over 30 tattoos, this woman completely redefined what we knew about tattooing in ancient Egypt. The extensive use of Hathoric imagery in these tattoos further showed us the incredible amount of religious agency women could hold during a time when the title "priestess of Hathor" was not even attested. Since then, we have used infrared imaging to identify dozens of new tattoos among the many unpublished human remains at the site. This talk presents the most recent findings from the bioarchaeological team of the 2019 and 2020 IFAO mission at Deir el-Medina. These additional tattoos indicate that many more individuals were likely tattooed at Deir el-Medina. Additionally, the designs and placement of tattoos varied broadly. Coalescing the physical and art historical evidence, this talk offers some of the most comprehensive evidence we have to date on the practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt.  About the Speaker: Dr. Anne Austin (Photo by August Jennewein for the University of Missouri-St. Louis Daily)                     Anne Austin is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Archaeology at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. Her research combines the fields of osteology and Egyptology in order to better understand daily life in ancient Egypt. Specifically, she uses data from ancient Egyptian human remains and daily life texts to reconstruct ancient Egyptian health care networks and identify the diseases and illnesses people experienced in the past. While working in Egypt, Anne discovered the only known ancient Egyptian tattoos on a mummy with over 30 different tattoos. Her next research project will focus on the practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt and its potential connections to gender, religion, and medicine. In addition to her interest in Egyptology and osteology, Anne works on improving archaeological data management practices through her participation in an international, collaborative ethnographic research study on archaeological field schools. About ARCE-NC: For more information, please visit http://arce-nc.org, https://facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE/, https://twitter.com/ARCENCPostings, or https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://www.arce.org/become-arce-member and select "Berkeley, CA" as your chapter when you sign up.