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A history of tattooing
Kings and commoners. Sailors and
prisoners. Tribesmen and sweethearts. All have shared one thing:
the art of the tattoo.
Evidence from ancient Egypt, Greenland, Siberia, and New Zealand
shows how truly global the tattooer's art is - and how old. In
fact, tattooing had existed for thousands of years before
England's Captain Cook encountered it in the South Pacific in
1769. Merchant and naval seamen soon spread the art to Europe
and America. But while its meaning has varied from people to
people and from place to place, tattooing has most often served
as a sign of social status, as a mark of one's passage through
life, or simply as a way to beautify the body.
Once regarded in the West as frightening and repulsive, the
tattoo has enjoyed great popularity in our own culture in recent
years. Everywhere we look today - movies, advertisements,
television-are signs that people of all walks of life appreciate
and practice the art of the tattoo.
Origin of Tattooing
Believe it or not, some
scientists say that certain marks on the skin of the Iceman, a
mummified human body dating from about 3300 B.C., are tattoos.
If that's true, these markings represent the earliest known
evidence of the practice. Tattoos found on Egyptian and Nubian
mummies date from about 2000 B.C., and classical authors mention
the use of tattoos in connection with Greeks, ancient Germans,
Gauls, Thracians and ancient Britons.
Tattooing was rediscovered by Europeans when exploration brought
them into contact with Polynesians and American Indians. The
word tattoo comes from the Tahitian word tattau, which means "to
mark," and was first mentioned in explorer James Cook's records
from his 1769 expedition to the South Pacific. Because tattoos
were considered so exotic in European and U.S. societies,
tattooed Indians and Polynesians drew crowds at circuses and
fairs during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Tattooed Mummies
In October, 1991, a five
thousand year old tattooed man made the headlines of newspapers
all over the world when his frozen body was discovered on a
mountain between Austria and Italy. He had apparently been
hunting and was caught in a snowstorm as he tried to return
home. Together with the body were clothing, a bow and arrows, a
bronze ax and flint for making fire.
"I don't like superlatives," said Professor Konrad Spindler of
Innsbruck University, but this is the only body of a Bronze Age
man found in a glacier, and certainly the best preserved corpse
of that period ever found." The skin is of great interest
because it bears several tattoos: a cross on the inside of the
left knee, six straight lines 15 centimeters long above the
kidneys and numerous parallel lines on the ankles. Spindler
stated that the position of the tattoo marks suggests that they
were probably applied for therapeutic reasons.
Instruments that were probably used for tattooing during the
Upper Paleolithic (10,000 BC to 38,000 BC) have been discovered
at several archaelogical sits in Europe. Typically these
instruments consist of a disk made of clay and red ochre
together with sharp bone needles that are inserted into holes in
the top of the disk. The disk served as a reservoir and source
of pigment, and the needles were used to pierce the skin. Clay
and stone figures with engraved designs which probably represent
tattooing have been found together with such instruments.
The Iceman
In 1992, at the very border
of Austria and Italy, high up in the Alp Mountains, the body of
a man was found, and as they realized that he was more than 5000
years old, they realized they had found a sensation. He had been
under ice for all those years, so his body, clothes and
equipment was extraordinarily well preserved.
He was tattooed! In all 58 tattoos has been counted on his body.
His tattoos were only simple dots and little lines.
That he was tattooed, was of course not a coincidence. It was
probably totally normal for people at his time to be tattooed.
Since the tattoos does not represent anything - like animals and
the like, speculation has been made as to their meaning. The
truth will never be found, but theories and speculations will be
made!
The Scythians
Just after the Second World
War, archeologists excavated the first of a long row of graves
in the Altai Mountains of Southern Siberia.
These graves had been full of permanently frozen ice, so
everything in them was perfectly preserved.
Within grave number two, the archeologists found a well
preserved chieftain with some fantastic tattoos. These are the
oldest known picture-tattoos.
The Chieftains Tattoos are representing different totem- and
game animals.
They are all done in a very distinct style, which is repeated in
anything else that they made at the time. When they were carving
wood, leather, metalwork, jewelry, felt applications,
embroidery, weaving, etc etc. they used saw things in the same
way. You may see some of their handicrafts here.
This is something that is the same all over the world, and also
in other times. People use the same ideas and the same way of
expressing themselves in all kinds of media.
The Scythians are also very interesting for us in Scandinavia,
because some hundred years later the Vikings met with the
Scythians. The Vikings traveled up the Russian rivers and met
with the Scythians, and the Scythians themselves have been all
the way to Europe to plunder and ravage.
That way the Scythians' way of seeing things influenced the way
the Vikings worked their crafts - and tattoos.
Early Tattooing Methods
An amazing variety of
tattooing methods developed in different cultures. In North and
South America, many Indian tribes routinely tattooed the body or
the face by simple pricking, and some tribes in California
introduced color into scratches. Many tribes of the Arctic and
Subarctic, mostly Inuit, and some people in eastern Siberia,
made needle punctures through which a thread coated with pigment
(usually soot) was drawn underneath the skin. In Polynesia and
Micronesia, pigment was pricked into the skin by tapping on a
tool shaped like a small rake.
The Maori people of New Zealand, who are world famous for their
tattooing, applied their wood carving technique to tattooing. In
the moko style of Maori tattooing, shallow, colored grooves in
distinctive, complex designs were produced on the face and
buttocks by striking a small bone-cutting tool (used for shaping
wood) into the skin. After the Europeans arrived in the 1700s,
the Maori began using the metal that settlers brought for a more
conventional style of puncture tattooing.
 
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