 Welcome and good morning. As associate curator of the Bodie Museum, I would like to welcome you all to today's lecture. I'd like to first introduce Bodie Museum curator, Melissa Craddock, to read our land statements. Thanks, Brooke. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Ho Chiun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Oh Lone. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations and we honor their elders, both past and present. We're living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. Across many global contexts, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages and human rights is contested on the basis of sex and gender identity. In an effort to bring light to these timely issues, to serve a broader public audience online and to connect to the local community that it serves, the Bodie Museum is taking action to become a more inclusive, welcoming and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion adopted by its parent institution, Pacific School of Religion. One of these steps is to creation of public programming. Through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn and work toward creating a more inclusive museum community. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Melissa. I would now like to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Anne Austin is an assistant professor of anthropology and archeology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Her research combines the field 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 healthcare networks and identify the diseases and illnesses people experienced in the past. Anne's next research project will focus on the practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt and its potential connections to gender, religion and medicine. Today, she'll be speaking to us about tattooed women, Bess and the Marsh, connecting tattooed bodies and figurines at Darryl Medina, Egypt. Take it away, Anne. Thanks, Brooke. And thank you all for inviting me. I'm really excited to share this research with everyone here today and anyone who's able to watch in the future. Now, this talk is geared for people who have just joined in and learned that there are tattooed bodies from ancient Egypt and for people who've learned a little bit about ancient Egyptian tattooing and want to learn more about our recent research at the site of Darryl Medina. So let me first give you some orientation around this topic and introduce you to the ways that we even talk about tattooing more broadly. And I'll start with this summary of publications on tattooed human remains from sites across the world. So globally, up until 2016, we can look at the number of articles that people publish about tattooing in the past. And you can see that from 1875 to 1975, there was only two, maybe three publications coming out every 25 years. And it isn't until the late 1970s that we start to see this topic really blossom and bloom. If we look at publications just from the last 10 years alone, they are far more numerous than the entire previous century combined. Part of the reason we see that is differences in our opinions and thoughts about tattooing and also our ability to survey the evidence. So let me look at that in more depth by focusing on what we know about tattooing from this earlier research in ancient Egypt. And I'll start with the evidence we could get from archeology and written sources. And what you'll see is that as I go through the evidence that we have for tattooing, there's unfortunately a lot of problems and limitations. So we'll begin with looking for evidence in archeological contexts, what kind of artifacts, what kind of objects can we find that we're associated with tattooing? And I can tell you that it's very hard. You're literally looking for needles in a city that had been occupied for hundreds to thousands of years. So for example, on the left, we see an image of some copper needles from the pre-dynastic or early dynastic site of Kafr Hassan Daoud. And these needles were found together and proposed by Tassid, a possibly be tattoo implements. But they could have been used for other purposes. In fact, when we find ancient needles in other contexts, we associate them with cloth production or other functions. So even when we find artifacts that could be affiliated with tattooing, it's very difficult to positively identify them as the implements actually used to tattoo human skin. In Egypt, we have the benefit of being able to use written sources to learn about ancient tattooing, but unfortunately, the written record in Egypt while extensive does not talk about this practice. Take for example, papyrus bremner rind, a very extensive papyrus that originally dates to the Ptolemaic period, but represents also earlier texts around ancient Egyptian religion and practice. This papyrus has a verb methen in it. And when it first appears, it seems like it might be about tattooing. It's written with a kind of sharp implement. So it seems like it's about inscribing into the skin and it describes methenu inscribing into the arms of two individuals. But if we look just a little later in that same text with that same verb, the verb methen is used and described as inscribing into a waxen figure of APEP. In that case, it seems like the verb is being used for something that's not human skin and perhaps the implement that they have a sharp knife might not even apply. Since if we look at evidence that I'll show you from human remains, it seems that tattoos were more likely to be hand poked rather than incised. Another area that people have looked for evidence of tattooing is in artistic contexts. So for example, in the middle kingdom, we find these markings on the bodies of truncated figurines like the one in the center or paddle dolls like the one on the left. In some cases, these markings are really ambiguous. It's hard to know. Are the markings intended to show tattoos or are they intended to show some kind of decoration? Are they intended to show jewelry? Are they intended to show henna and temporary markings on the skin? And when we do have ones that we think are actually meant to represent tattoos, they tend to be geometric patterns of dots and dashes. And so it's hard to interpret what the tattoos mean, how they functioned, why they're positioned where they are on the skin. If we look a little later in time, we go to the new kingdom. We have images of an Egyptian god, Bess, who is a god that was associated with protections for the household, particularly children and young mothers. And here I wanna show you kind of the diversity of examples of possible tattoos of Bess. You can see a variety of images here. Each of them are drawings that I made based on these Bess-looking tattoos that were found either in paintings, in pottery or in ostraca. And when we look at them, you can see that there's some similarities across these. You see there's this figure that has bent arms, bent legs. It's standing on a ground line. And in some cases it has a crown that has three to four or even two to four feathers emerging from it. However, if we look at some of the most kind of simple forms of these. So for example, if you look in the figure that's not the bottom right most, but one left to it, you can see that's very simplified, right? There's just two lines with a wave in between them. And on its own, if we only found that one example, it would be hard to make the argument that this is meant to represent the God Bess. But when we put it within this broader visual canon, you can start to see the associations. So this is another issue that I found when we look at possible tattoos in art historic contexts, they're often really abbreviated, difficult to identify what they're showing. So even when they're meant to represent something figural, we might not be able to determine what that is. Because of these reasons, it's actually turning to human remains where we can get the most positive and unambiguous evidence for tattooing in the past. And so this talk is gonna focus on the evidence we have from human remains, from the new kingdom site of Darrell Medina and what that evidence tells us about the practice of tattooing. We'll look at pictures of possible tattoos along with a lot of the data that I've been able to glean identifying tattoos in those contexts. Now the first human remains that had evidence of tattooing were three women found near the temple of Nepepet Rehmetuhotep II during excavations in 1891 and 1922. These excavations now over a century old are really the only physical evidence of tattooed women from an Egyptian burial site that we had until the last decade and a half. These have been recently revisited by Roarig who looked at the evidence for their burials and found that these women were in really high elite contexts. So for example, one woman had this box between the lower left-hand corner that accompanied with it a zah amulet made out of electrum, a mix of gold and silver as well as a carnelian bead. These are the kinds of objects that we'd find only in elite burials. And in fact, one of the women that was identified in these excavations, her name was Amunet. She was a priestess of Hathor, so she had some senior titles including soul ornament of the king or more recently translated lady in waiting. When we look at their tattoos, you can see their tattoos matched the kind of geometric patterns we were just seeing in the previous slide. So you can see they're actually quite extensively tattooed. There are tattoos along their thighs, lower legs, their arms and chest. And these tattoos tend to take that dot and dash pattern. So while the evidence here is quite clear, unfortunately their interpretation remained ambiguous with even the woman who was identified as a priestess of Hathor, her tattoos were still unknown to be if they were affiliated with Hathor or they're for other reasons. Many scholars assumed, for example, that these tattoos were a mark of their Nubian identity and a mark that they were actually not Egyptian. So even in this context, the tattoos we're seeing is something separate from distant from not part of an Egyptian identity. Another issue that I've found when we look at this research on tattooing is that this very small amount of ambiguous evidence that we had for the 20th century paired with it a lot of baggage. So when I look at how scholars talk about tattooing, I see how their perceptions of Egyptian tattoos often map on to some of the stigma associated with tattooing at the time. Winlock here describes, quote, and with it, a little fan's dancing girl clad in a cowry shell girdle and tattooing to amuse him after the hunt, referring to the tomb owner. Lee Keimer goes on, and this is in a translation from French, he goes on to say, that all the women tattooed by dots or strokes whose mummies or representations Egyptian antiquity bequeath us women of questionable morality. And of the mummified women that I just showed you, he says, to be attached to some divine service, they were nonetheless street walkers. Adding, quote, I would add that I do not know of any example going back to ancient Egypt of a woman of good society adorned with tattoos. It's with this last quote that we can see, Keimer is associating tattoos with some kind of lower immoral group of society, but these are something that is restricted to the lower class. And this notion is repeated when Ogden Goulet wrote that tattooing was, quote, a practice limited to servants and the lower classes. I didn't remind you of what we just saw, that the very limited evidence we have actually comes from elite burial contexts. So this idea that they had to be of some kind of lower class status doesn't match the evidence that we're getting. And the notion that the tattoos were merely there as a way to amuse Neferhotep as a way to elicit some kind of carnal desire in a tomb owner or in the king, that those notions don't always map on to the tattoos that I'm seeing in human remains. So for instance, if we look at the drawing on the bottom right-hand corner of the tattoos of a manate, you can see that the tattoos in this context along the lower abdomen would have actually grown and changed in shape and form during the pregnancy of this individual. So when we talk about tattooing as something that's explicitly for the erotic desire of some tomb owner of the king of a male in all of these cases, it seems that it doesn't actually betray what's going on in the ancient Egyptian evidence that they had available to them. I position this as something of the 20th century, but what I've seen is because that's our foundational scholarship on tattooing in ancient Egypt, what we see is that over time and even in the most recent publications, this notion that tattooing was exclusively to elicit erotic desire continues to be the case. So for example, we have this original quote from 1988, small in scale, easily fondled and intentionally rendered physically helpless. Such statuettes, meaning that though truncated figurines that we just saw the ones that were in green, such statuettes were interred with the deceased to arouse his primitive sexual instincts. The priestess Amunet and the figurines in question are all associated with Hathor, the most lascivious of all Egyptian goddesses. Consequently, the tattoos of this group of figurines and of the mummy of Amunet have an undeniably carnal overtone. Another author says the women who are tattooed on their leg with an image of the God best are women of shameless and liberty morals who are ready to give themselves to their husband, lover or client. And the final quote says the paintings and artifacts depicting pretty tattooed girls might suggest that this style of tattooing was fashionable in Egypt only among female musicians, dancers and courtesans. And that all tattooed women considered tattooing as an appropriate way to enhance their carnal beauty. These quotes show this continuous interest in thinking about tattoos as exclusively eroticizing. They also suggest that tattoos must be associated with sex work with several implications for this. So for example, the middle quote references that women are ready to give themselves to their clients. The final quote uses a word courtesans, which in some contexts is used as a way to kind of reference sex work as well. And we see earlier quotes from the 20th century also talking about tattooed women as sex workers. In reality, however, we actually just don't have evidence for that. We don't have records that make any of those associations. We don't have any evidence that talks about sex work and tattooing together. In fact, sex work is actually not talked about in ancient Egypt. So that doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it does suggest that these notions that connect tattooing with eroticized female bodies and sex work come from some other place. And I'd argue where they're coming from is actually the ideas that were present and ubiquitous in America and Europe during the 19th and 20th century when these quotes first start to appear. Olive Oatman pictured on the left is one of the most famous examples of early tattooed women in this new ideas around talking about tattooing during that time in America and Europe. Her story was made famous because on her road to Westward expansion, she and her sister were abducted. And when they were abducted, their chins were tattooed. So we have this famous picture of her with a tattooed chin and her story was repeated and moderated and changed by others as they sought to connect tattooing with the mystery, the intrigue of Westward expansion in the United States. Irene Woodward took advantage of this herself. So she used a story that she grew up in a little log cabin and her father having liked tattooing so much that she tattooed her whole body. The story was something that she fabricated but still used those same connections. And when we look even a little forward, we see that women start to be really extensively used as tattoo shows. For instance, Betty Broadbent was in the circus as a tattooed performer. She's pictured here with over 400 tattoos on her body. And as women stripped down to show the tattoos, their bodies were both exhibit of tattooing and also a way to kind of more culturally acceptably show women's skin. So they had that notion, that connection with sexuality. These erotic connections, I could go into more depth but if you're interested in learning more I have a recent article that a book chapter that's come out in this book, Women in Ancient Egypt since it's Women's History Month, I wanted to let people know about this. This is a volume that just came out. It has contributions from over two dozen scholars. And in it, we focus on what we've learned about women and how our recent research has really changed the notions that we have about ancient Egyptian women. The point here is that these original ideas seem to really not be based in the ancient Egyptian evidence and are much stronger correlated with what's going on in Europe, what's going on in America. The ideas that people have about tattooing that they're pushing onto the ancient Egyptian evidence. So what we're gonna do here today is actually take a step back, look at our new evidence and see how that might change some of these ideas we have around the role of tattooed women in ancient Egypt. And I'll just point out that one of the really exciting things about this topic is it is a new topic. So you're looking at a table that was published in 2019. So it can be even updated from here. This table shows all of the evidence that comes from Egypt of individuals who have tattoos. Now you can see the examples that I just talked about are on here, but you can see there are far more examples that also include some burials in Nubian context in Egypt. Everything that has an orange arrow has been published since 2000 with many of the publications coming out in the last five to 10 years. So as we get more evidence, we actually have a much better understanding of the practice of tattooing and we can start changing some of these misconceptions. Some of the earliest evidence we have for tattooing is now coming from Egypt. So we have examples that are pre-dynastic and we also have a lot more examples coming from the research that we're doing at the site of Darrell Medina. Where now, cumulatively, we actually have enough examples that we probably have more tattoos at Darrell Medina than any of the other sites and periods from Egypt combined. And the first example I wanna talk about is the first evidence that I found for tattooing. And I'll tell you that this was not something I was looking for. I didn't actually plan to study tattooing, but I do work as a bioarchaeologist for the Institut Français d'archéologie orientale's mission at Darrell Medina. And my original goal and scholarship was focused on identifying the human remains at the site, learning more about health, about the experiences of the people in this village, about their demography. And so I was working on site as a member of this mission. I was inside a tomb and inside that tomb, the human remains were all commingled. And my commingled, I mean, when they were originally found by the French Institute a century ago, they'd been looted extensively. So the bodies had been really torn to pieces. And what was left was a pile of human remains. And those human remains had been moved out of the way so that that tomb that I was working in could be accessed and visited. The village of Darrell Medina, I'll just mention for those of you who are unfamiliar with it is the village of the tomb workers who caught and decorated royal tombs in Egypt's new kingdom period. And I want you to think of these people as a pretty elite group. They are doing hard physical manual labor, at least the men within the village, but they are also given every resource they need by the Egyptian state. So they're almost a mix of a blue and white collar workforce. As I was working in the human remains in this tomb, I came across this one torso of a woman. You can see the head wasn't present, the hands weren't present and the legs weren't present. But I instantly noticed markings on her neck. And moving back from that, I looked along her body and I saw the extensive number of tattoos in the image before you. She had over 30 tattoos along her arms, shoulders, lower back and neck. Now, if you want to learn more about this particular woman and her tattoos, feel free to look at the open source article that I co-authored, the Sidriq Obey in 2017, where we talk about all of these tattoos and put them in context. But I'll just give you a quick rundown of some of the ones that really gave us the most information. And I'll start by looking at this motif that we see at the neck and the top of the shoulder, which is the ear, nephra formula. It's composed of the sacred wadjet eye with two to three nephra signs between them. And when found in other contexts, it's been interpreted as a way to say, to do good, to do good. So you can read the hieroglyphs from the center moving out, the nephra sign meaning goodness, the eerie sign means to do. And here, when it's done with a wadjet eye, it's given that kind of divine ability to do good. What's fascinating with this is that it was placed not only at the tops of the shoulders, but in the neck, it's placed over the voice box. So we suggested that in the way that Egyptians thought about magic and how it operated, as she spoke, as her voice came up, she actually contacted the voice box. It actually went and touched the voice box and it was through that process that she was able to do good in the way that she used her voice to sing. Moving down the arm, we also found tattoos that match exactly the problems I showed you earlier. So for example, we see these markings in this one image of these four women at the tops of their shoulders. It's this cross pattern, very reduced, doesn't really tell us what it is. And previous scholars suggested maybe this is a representation of tattoos. We did find, in fact, some cross-like patterns on this woman's shoulder. So you can see the three sides of a possible cross in the upper left-hand corner of the image, but we don't know what they are. We can't tell, we know it's more complex than a cross, but it just gives you a sense that when we find these tattoos, there are many different patterns that are really hard for us to make out, maybe because they're not appearing in the standard places where we're looking for these motifs. We also found numerous tattoos that connect with the goddess Hathor. So we found cows that connect with that goddess. We found these tattoos on her back that are also graffiti found on the floor of the goddess Hathor at Darrell Medina. And when we look at the different kinds of connections we have, we see that she had clear connections with this goddess. And interestingly, those wajidais that I told you that were part of that formula at the top of her shoulders and neck, those wajidais also appear on her back. So literally any way you look at her body, you have a pair of these divine eyes of a goddess looking out back at you. In combination, Cedric Goli and I argued that the evidence of tattooing in this one woman show that she likely had a very important religious role within her village, whether as a wise woman, as a magician who's doing work for healing and a healer. It's hard to know. She could have even been a kind of priestess, but what's fascinating is if we look at texts and titles during this time, the title, Priestess of Hathor, that same title that Amunut had just a few hundred years earlier, that title is gone. So when we look at those kinds of sources, we look at official titles of religious hierarchy, we don't have evidence that women are fulfilling these roles. And yet the tattoos tell us a different story and start to make new arguments around what tattoos are doing. And here we argued that the tattoos are giving her these divine abilities. They're helping embody the divine in her body. So with that one initial discovery, we already had a much different idea about what was going on with tattooing. But what made that discovery hard to contextualize is really where did it come from? Where did a woman with 30 tattoos, with basically half sleeves on both arms, neck tattoos and back tattoos, whose legs we don't even know, who may also have been tattooed, where did she come from? In a context where we originally didn't even really have evidence that people were tattooing, aside from a couple of ambiguous depictions of single tattoos. So with this, I wanna turn to our new evidence from Daryl Medina, because as I mentioned, we have found more and more evidence of tattooing. And as we look at that additional evidence, it starts to give us some better ideas. And I'll start with just thinking the folks who have been working with me in the field. This photo shows our 2022 team, Malek on the left, Milly just to the right of me and Amandine to my far right. We've been able to start working in additional tombs at Daryl Medina where we have other combing old remains. We've been able to inventory and conserve those individuals. And as we're doing that work, we have found more and more evidence. So we have found tattoo after tattoo, after tattoo, after tattoo. And this bottom right image shows you the complexity of the work that we're doing, how the reason why we're probably finding these tattoos and other people might not be. If you look at this bottom right image, this is a photo in the regular visible light of the lower back and hips of a woman from Daryl Medina. Now I'm gonna show you this photo in infrared photography. And instantly appears this extensive tattoo motif that went along her lower back. Simply put, many of the tattoos that we find at Daryl Medina are invisible unless photographed in infrared light. So, well, I think there's bias in our expectations of finding tattoos and that might be one of the reasons we haven't found tattoos very frequently when looking at ancient Egyptian human remains. I'd argue equally important is that our technology and skills at looking for these tattoos have vastly improved. So when we think back to the very beginning of this talk that showed just a blossoming of tattoo research in recent years, part of the reason is we are getting better and better at looking for and identifying tattoos. And it's with this that I hope other scholars will start identifying tattoos at other sites like ours, Daryl Medina. So as we get more evidence, we are starting to ask different questions. So for instance, we can ask questions about the distribution of these tattoos. Where are they appearing? Now, the image that you see in front of you in red shows the places where we found tattoos on the first woman that was so extensively tattooed. And the blue shows new areas where we found tattoos since then. You can see, for instance, the lower back which I'll talk about in a moment was really a center point, a place where we find them repeatedly. But interestingly, we have not found the exact same tattoo in the exact same location of all the people that we've looked at. We can also ask when and to whom are these visible? So it's interesting, the first woman that we found, her tattoos were mostly highly visible. You can see, for example, that she didn't have tattoos placed along the very tops of her shoulders where you would expect the dress to lie. So the area covered by cloth is actually not tattooed but the areas surrounding it were. The only areas that we found in that example that weren't normally exposed would be the ones on her lower back. So it's possible that when we look at this evidence, we can see that tattoos shift in meaning depending on their location and symbolism. We can ask how is imagery linked to location which will come up in a few moments. We can also ask about things like, age, sex or gender. So you'll notice that in this talk, I've really been talking about tattooed women in ancient Egypt and the reason is it's an extremely gendered practice. So when we look at the evidence we have from the Middle Kingdom and from the New Kingdom, from most of the places and time periods that you've seen so far in this lecture, that evidence is dominantly on women. It seems to be a tradition very gendered, very much focused on women's bodies and may have even been done by women because in other contexts, other anthropological studies when we find gendered tattoo practices, they often are done by women or women. In terms of age, so far when we look in human remains at least, all of our evidence comes from adults. We don't have anyone under the age of 20 to 25. We don't have anyone under that age with evidence of tattooing. Although our sample size is quite small so we keep looking to see if we can find evidence in some of these other places. So do we find evidence on men? Do we find evidence on teenagers or even children? We can also ask what kind of symbols and motifs are there? How common are they? How unique? What's missing? So for example, I showed you at the beginning of the talk these possible best tattoos that were found in drawings and depictions. And what we'll see in this talk is that we actually have our first physical evidence of one of these. So we can now say that those drawings aren't meant to be something temporary. They're actually showing a real tattoo that we have evidence for from our site. I'll also point out that we don't really get hieroglyphic tattoos. Tattoos aren't textual in the way that we talk about Egyptian texts. In fact, they do seem to have some kind of visual language. They do show up in other places where we don't have text. So as I showed you, we have some really reduced symbols that were found as graffiti. And those symbols are hieroglyphic in nature, but they aren't grammatical texts. They aren't very extensive, they aren't very long. They're usually one or two hieroglyphs put together. So when we look at what these are showing, the visual language, it isn't the same. It's a textual language. And this again might point to the fact that the people who are making and producing these tattoos and wearing these tattoos, these people are wearing them with a whole different canon, a whole different tradition than our kind of traditional textual tradition, which is dominantly done by men, at least in this context. So here we also see there might be a gender divide in the way that these symbols are being used and developed. I'm not only looking for this evidence in human remains, we're also looking at what we can see from artistic depictions. So already we started to answer some of these questions like do depicted tattoos match the physical evidence, which we're able to see with this image of the God best. You can see a painted version of this found on the thighs of a woman from a painting inside a household at Darrell Medina. But we can also look at when did tattoos show up and when are they not present in depictions of tattoos to see if that tells us more about what is going on about when and who gets tattooed. It's interesting. This is an example of an ostracon from Darrell Medina and it's got this painting of a woman doing acrobatic move. So you can see she's bending her back. And on her thigh, we have one of those kind of dot and dash geometric style tattoos, similar to the ones we found from earlier periods, but present here at Darrell Medina. But I can look at a very similar ostracon from the tour museum and see very similar acrobatic performance with no tattoo present. So if we are starting to interpret these tattoos as mean ethnicity or identity, it's interesting to see that they don't always appear in some of the exact same contexts. Now this is where I get to really the part where we can bridge these things together. So we're not just looking at human remains and art as separate traditions, but really how do these overlap? How do they work together? What data can we get from both? And what do they mutually tell us about what tattoos may have meant to women at least in this one village in ancient Egypt? For this, I'm gonna present some data from an article that just came out in December of 2022 through the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology that I co-authored with Mary-Lise Arnett from Johns Hopkins University. And these articles entitled of ink and clay, tattooed mummified human remains and female figurines from Darrell Medina and really is the source of the title of today's talk. Now what was fun is that I was working on site at Darrell Medina looking for evidence and finding evidence of tattooing in human remains sitting at lunch one day. And Mary-Lise said, hey Ann, take a look at this. She was studying the hand-modeled figurines from the site. And both of us saw the possible evidence of tattooing marked on these hand-modeled figurines. So it was from that that she and I decided to write this article and to really compare what are we seeing across the human remains and the figurines that might tell us more about this practice. Now what's really interesting about the work that Mary-Lise was doing is she was looking at these figurines and these are ones that are as I mentioned hand-modeled. So they're not mass manufactured. And you can see that especially is visible in the middle image. These figurines are often shown as pregnant. So the ones where we found evidence of tattooing also often were shown as being pregnant. And their tattoos started to have some of the same motifs. It's the tattoos that I've been showing you in this presentation. So we looked not only at this evidence but pulled in any of our other evidence of tattooing from the same region in same period. And we started to notice similarities across different evidence. For example, when I showed you that image in infrared suddenly made tattoos appear. What I showed you was a pattern of tattoos in the lower back of a woman that had an image of Ibex's eating from floral bouquets on either hip between which you can see a zigzag pattern which might evoke water and above which we have another one of those wadget eyes, those protective symbols. Now fascinatingly there is a spoon from the Pushkin Museum which you can see an image of above. And when we look at the tattoos of that spoon you can see a very similar motif. You have Ibex mounting this floral motif that's going in the center with watery lines underneath. And here it's an Ibex that's shown in a marshy environment with marshy plants and water appearing. This is on the lower back that hotspot for tattoos. We also as we saw have an image of the God Bess evidenced in the tattoos. So you can see here a reconstruction of another woman with another lower back tattoo. But here we have the God Bess represented by that bent arm and bent leg on the left side of this image with a crown we reconstructed it to have four feathers but it could have a different amount. And he's standing next to a pot of fat. And now this was actually part of the offerings given to women just after childbirth during that very tenuous period where both women and child need to survive. In Daryl Medina we have texts that talk about the gifts given to that woman for that two week interval. And the cone of fat was one of those gifts and Bess was associated with this time as a protector of women and children during such perilous moments. If we look across some of our other evidence you can see the consistency of these wavy lines just above the buttocks. The use of floral motifs always placed around the hips or between the hips. And those also appear in some of the other hand modeled figurines that Meredith was studying. So when we looked across this evidence we pulled out several patterns that were starting to emerge. And one of the things we noticed was that we consistently find these dot markings that were done especially in the figurines depicting possible tattoos. And in some cases it was really hard to know. Were we looking at dots that were meant to represent tattoos? Were they meant to represent magic? Were they meant to represent both? And what we found was that in some cases it really seemed that our dots and squiggly lines that those are abbreviated tattoos like the one you see in the bottom. More ambiguous are things like these seven dots placed at the neck of this individual. Since we know that in ancient Egyptian magic for example they would use seven knots for example on a necklace to protect the seven orifices of the skull. So your two eyes, your two ears, your nostrils and mouth. So as we worked on this we started to see when could we actually delineate something as a tattoo versus a marking for something else? We also noticed this pattern of using the lower back, part of the body that's often affiliated with erotic desire and sexuality and the use of the i-backs eating a bouquet which is another thing that we've tended to find objects that are in more erotic context using that connotation, that connection between the i-backs and sexual desire. So we argued that the tattoos do have that kind of erotic function when they're on the lower back, when they're serving, when they have connections to eroticism and the kinds of symbols they have but we also found examples where the marshy scenes on the lower back may have actually been connected with a kind of medical protection during childbirth. So we argue hypothetically, this is all new so we're still working our way through the evidence but we argue that when we look at medical texts talk about what to do when women are experiencing pain from partition for example, what we see in those texts is that the lower back pain, that area of the body is described as fire and you use water and the cooling waters as a medical treatment to try and manage with that fire. So presenting watery marshy scenes on the lower back seems like an ideal way to make that connection to connect between the fires that need to be cooled and to actually ritually, magically cool the body. And then as I mentioned, what we're seeing with this best tattoo is connected exactly with the kinds of protections that were done after birth and the kinds of objects given to women to ensure success for both a woman and child soon after childbirth. Now the tattoo that I showed you earlier we actually of course after submitting our publication found the rest of that tattoo motif in our next season of field work at Darrell Medina. And so I have it pictured here so you can see it. You can see the part that we began with, the bent arms and bent legs of best next to a pot of fat. And if you move to the right you can see that that chevron pattern continues. We have a beautiful floral bouquet at the center of the back and then on the far right we have a repeat of best but above it skin is preserved in an area that was not preserved on the left side. And when I see that image of what's above one thing I notice is some possible connections to the birth arbors that we find at Darrell Medina as depicted in Ostraca. So I have an example of one of these Ostraca here. You can see a woman is breastfeeding and around her you can see she's surrounded by this shrine it's made of papyrus plants that are then connected with the convulvulus leaves going up those papyrus plants. I see a direct connection between that and some of the imagery that's present on the right side of this tattoo. So this would be another bit of evidence that could suggest that this tattoo is really connecting between what's happening visually for women just after birth and the things needed to protect them. Overall, through their location, symbolism and shared motifs what we see is that tattooing connects to women's multiple roles in the birth process whether as lovers, as being pregnant as midwives or new mothers. We find that the gods that they're associated with these images of Bess or Besset and Hathor are the same gods that are also the ones that protect this very important period of childbirth and early and pregnancy. And what I see when I look at this evidence more broadly is that with each new discovery that we've made, we have new ideas about what's happening with tattooing in ancient Egypt. And so it's with that that I hope in our future seasons at Daryl Medina, we can continue to unravel the mystery of what tattooing was and understand its function in Egypt more broadly. Thank you. Thank you so much for your fascinating and incredibly comprehensive talk. I would like to invite our YouTube audience to some ear questions for Dr. Austin. In the meantime, to get us started, I was wondering, so at the beginning of your talk, you talk a little bit about sort of the, you show something like the distribution of tattoos and where they are on the body. And I was wondering if you could go into more detail about the relationship between the distribution of tattoos on the body and clothing or dress. So what kinds of clothing were these women wearing? And does your analysis take into consideration clothing that they might wear in different contexts, both occupational and everyday? And especially as you talk about, they seem to show different roles that women could occupy. Great question. So the standard dresses that we have from Egypt during this time were ones that would extend down to the lower legs. They'd have a kind of wide top. So they would leave the top of the shoulder exposed, but they would cover much of the lower back and the lower body. However, those are kind of your standard everyday dress. If we think about what these tattoos are functioning as, it's possible that some of the tattoos could be revealed in different contexts. So one of the things that I didn't go into but comes up when they talk about tattooing the Middle Kingdom is a connection between tattooing Hathor and these particular dances for Hathor by the Kenneth dancers. And this is a troupe of dancers that are dancing as Hathor really, as this goddess. And there's a very famous scene where the goddess reveals her vulva to the sun. And so we have these acrobatic dances of these women, kind of doing these backflips like the one I showed Dostrakhov. And when I see those, I think about like, especially when we look at dancers, they have different dress, right? And so when I see those, it's intriguing to think about when would tattoos be visible versus invisible? And who would they be visible to versus invisible during a dance, during a performance? And so those might be ones where like, for instance, tattoos on the thighs would become more visible, tattoos on the lower back would become more visible. And that suggests to me that the tattoos that are in different parts of the body that are less visible, maybe their visibility is just as important, right? But it's meant for very specific contexts. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. I mean, I guess going off of that, would any of the tattoos, and I don't know if you could even prove this, but like would any of the tattoos be meant to be invisible all the time or just for that individual rather than for anyone else viewing the person? Yeah. One way I think about that is when you look at a tattoo that you can, like A, could you see it if it was on your body? B, is it oriented toward you or is it oriented away from you? And the tattoos that were on the very extensively tattooed women tended to be oriented away from her. So for instance, the ones that were on her arm, if she were to look at them, they would be upside down. But if someone else were to look at them, they would be right side up. So those ones are, and she has several that she wouldn't actually ever be able to see unless maybe she's creative with a mirror. So those are ones where I'd argue, we are not seeing evidence that the tattoos were meant just for the visibility of the person who were wearing them. But I've looked across anthropological literature on tattooing and I've thought a lot about these ones on the thighs because I do have a connection with childbirth. And I have examples in anthropological literature where people get tattoos on the thighs. For instance, one is the tattoo on the inner thigh of a woman. So the first thing her baby sees is this tattoo, which is a really cool concept. I don't necessarily think that's exactly what's going on at Darrell and Medina, but I like using those sources to help think more creatively about how these might be working. Oh, fascinating. Okay, so I guess to follow up again with the sort of performative aspect of the tattoos. So you talked about the middle kingdom, the Henry dancers, who was the audience of these dance performers and so to whom were the tattoos being made visible in these sacred performance contexts? In the middle kingdom, those would be really elite audiences. So the kings and the really upper elite folks at Darrell and Medina, we would have the audience really be the people in that village, the other people that are part of that village. If they are indeed performing as affiliated with Hathor and Darrell and Medina with the site itself, that village itself, it's possible that, because this village is pretty elite, it's possible that they could have religious roles were important outside of the village, but that we just don't have a lot of evidence for yet. And could you discuss some of the gendered aspects of tattooing of women? So you mentioned anthropological parallels of tattooing by and for women in other contexts. What are these contexts and practices and how might they relate to your evidence in New Kingdom, Egypt to help or build a model for understanding the tattooing of women at Darrell and Medina? So Lars Krutuck has written an entire book on women's tattooing practices worldwide. So I'd point anyone who's interested in learning more to that work. And there he's really thinking about what is tattooing doing for women in all of these different contexts? In some places the tattooing is being done just for and by. In some cases it is being done by other people, but in many of the contexts when it's being done for and by, the relationship between the person who's getting the tattoo and the person who's making the tattoo is very important as well. So we'll see senior women in the community do the tattoos. We'll see senior women within a family do the tattoos. So there's places where that's a context. And I think it's really interesting to think at Darrell and Medina then, who was making these? Would it have been, for instance, our very heavily tattooed woman? Was she heavily tattooed? Was she also a tattooist? Like was there some importance to her having more tattoos than so far anyone else that we've been able to find? And I just don't know. These are the questions I'm asking and I can't answer yet. What I can say is, you know, this village, the artisans, the men who are working on the royal tombs, we always talk about them as the artisans. We always talk about the work that they produce. And in fact, I've had this bias whenever I see an ostraca with a picture on it from Darrell and Medina, my assumption is this is by one of the men in the village. And I've actually stepped back from that and started to question that because when I look at the ostraca, I find ostraca that don't match the normal artistic canons in ancient Egypt emerging from the village. So for instance, there's this one really strange ostraca, ostracan from Darrell and Medina. It's forward-facing, which Egyptians don't like to do. And it shows a neck and it has a cross at the neck. And it's one of the very few ones that shows a marking on the skin. And I thought, well, interesting. Like if I found this in any other context, I wouldn't think it was from Egypt at all because it looks so foreign but maybe part of the reason it looks so foreign is it's not being produced by the men in the village who are required to make art by a very specific canon. Maybe it's being produced with another tradition at all, completely. So I think about the tattooing as like this possible other artistic tradition that's happening, I know that we haven't seen in the village because it's not showing up in the places we tend to find evidence. It's not showing up on the two walls. It's not showing up in the written records. And so we don't actually have as much evidence for it but it is showing up on bodies and maybe in some of these other places. But all of that is just my hypothetical idea so far. Oh, that's wonderful. Would you mind actually stop sharing your screen? Okay, we have a YouTube question. So someone is interested to know if you were able to determine whether these women were Nubians? So far, I don't. So it's very hard to tell ethnicity simply from human remains. What I see is that there are at least connections between the type of tattoos they have and many of the other things happening by or near this village that is not associated with Nubia. So we do know that there were people who are Nubian in the village but most of the people at Daryl Medina were identified as Egyptian and had Egyptian ancestry and heritage that extends back as far as we have records within the village. And they have Egyptian names and other markers of like Egyptian ethnicity. So it's very hard to talk about human remains and like gives that kind of biological definition but I can say that the traditions of the symbols that we're finding are much more paralleled with other traditional symbols that we see is in Marca as Egyptian. And then someone else is wondering if you have, is there any evidence of skin scarification practices as in addition to the tattooing? So in the middle kingdom, the two of the women that I showed did have scarification on their lower abdomen. If we look at Daryl Medina so far we don't have evidence of scarification. For all of this, I'm always adding the caveat that we're still working through and we have very limited example so far. So we'll see if that does appear but otherwise I haven't seen any markings of scarification. And then one more question. Were these women artists or artisans? Yeah, what's the difference between artist and artisan? I mean, it's hard when we talk about artists in ancient Egypt is hard. Like when do you make the difference between one or the other? And more broadly in ancient Egypt we talk about artists, like we don't have people sign their work. We don't have that kind of individuality. And we often refer to the people of the village, the men in the village as artisans because they're doing work as a workshop, as a group that is standardized for the king. How these women and how their tattoos fit in is where I think we could all debate and discuss. Well, thank you so much again, Dr. Austin for your talk. It was wonderful. I can't wait to read your articles that are coming out and hear more about this fascinating project. I would like to invite our audience for our upcoming women and gender performance in the ancient Middle East lecture on March 23rd at 9.30 a.m. Dr. Pratima Golapala Krishnan will present Libering Women Work in Domestic Space in the Late Ancient Near East.