Hi my name's Daniel Antoine
I'm the curator of physical anthropology at the British Museum.
Welcome to my corner. [Music]
I'm the curator responsible for the human remains in the collection.
As part of that role I make sure that all the human remains are treated with
care, respect and dignity
but also my role involves organizing and actually doing research on the collections
and we have a wide array of differently preserved human remains
ranging from natural mummies
artificially mummified individuals
bog bodies
and a very large collection of skeletal remains.
If you want to address questions about how long people lived
what diseases they suffered from
and other questions regarding their biology
really we have to rely on the study of human remains.
Other sources of evidence such as written texts or the objects left behind
often don't address these issues.
I have been reanalyzing some of our oldest mummies in the collection.
These come from a site called Gebelein in Egypt
and we have seven individuals which have been naturally mummified.
These individuals come from a cemetery where most of the bodies had become skeletonized
they've become skeletons.
We don't know why some individuals naturally mummify.
It may be because they were buried at the hottest time of the year.
It may have been because their burials were particularly shallow
and so there was no evidence of intentional mummification.
The heat of the Sun and the desert rapidly dried their bodies
allowing them to survive to this day.
Very few such mummies have survived archaeologically
we're very lucky to have these seven individuals.
Around the world maybe a couple of dozen from that particular period
which is the pre-dynastic period
so this is the period immediately before Egypt was unified by the first pharaoh in around 3100 BC.
We've been doing new conservation to make sure that they are very well kept and preserved
but also with doing new research program we've taken them to hospitals to CT scan them
to actually determine exactly how well they are preserved
and to find out more about them as individuals
and we've been doing infrared imaging to determine whether there was
evidence of a body modification especially tattoos and actually what we
found is q uite remarkable, two out of the seven individuals that we have in the
collection have tattoos and that got us very very excited because there are very
few examples of tattoos that survive archaeologically it really depends on
the preservation of skin which only occurs in very special circumstances. The
oldest known tattoos in the world currently are the ones found on the
Iceman Otzi and these date to about just over five thousand years ago so when we
found tattoos on our mummies which are from a similar period the first thing we
wanted to do is determine how old these individuals were. We took very small
samples of their hair and the ones that were less well preserved we also used
fragments of their bones and using those we were able to determine that the two
tattooed individuals are from a similar period to odd C maybe slightly younger
but at least five thousand years old which makes them the oldest known
tattoos in the Nile Valley. They pushed back the evidence of tattooing in Africa
by a thousand years and are almost as old as Otzi's tattoos. Unlike Otzi's
these represent imagery that is also used in the art of the period one of our
Gebelein mummies has been on permanent display over a hundred years and we
hadn't noticed these tattoos until we used infrared imaging which allows us to
see carbon based inks much clearer.
So what's extraordinary is that his right
arm showed that there are two tattoos they both represent images of animals
one of them we think represents a Barbary sheep and the other one a bull
the use of the Barbary sheep in pre-dynastic iconography can be a bit
vague however the bull is often used as a symbol of male power and virility
which may have suggested that he was trying to appropriate these qualities.
The one found on the other individual which is currently storage which is a
female individual we think one of the two tattoos represents a crooked stave
or a throwing stick. We think is associated with ritual scene
with individuals holding that as a symbol potentially of power whereas the
S shaped symbols which always come in a set are harder to interpret but they have been
carefully placed on his shoulder and must have had a specific significance
this represents the earliest evidence of a woman with tattoos
what it meant to the bearer and the people who saw those tattoos still remains to be elucidated
their purpose may have differed between males and females
They are likely to be associated with the ideas of maybe cult knowledge, bravery or
protection but as we discover more evidence of tattooing in the past
hopefully we'll get new insight into what this type of visual language truly
means without these uniquely preserved individuals we would have never been
able to prove that tattooing occurred in what is the dawn of Egyptian civilisation.
If you would like to discover more about Gebelein man
he's currently on display in the early Egypt gallery, room 64.
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