In honor of Halloween being upon us, I figured I'd start my first post with the origins of tattoos and how they were discovered in the early people of the world. These people were, interestingly enough, the Egyptian mummies.
There are many interesting and intriguing things I've learned about Egypt and the people who lived there over my years as a college student. What I didn't know from all my years of Ancient World History and Anthropology was that Egypt was also one of the first places where we see the emergence of permanent body art. After reading an article by Cate Linebarry of the Smithsonian, I learned that the first tattoos were dated back to about 5000 BC. They were originally only found on women, and appeared to be seen as amulets of protection over pregnancy and childbirth. As we moved throughout the region, and into Greece and Rome, tattoos began to appear on people of all sorts. Now, men and women alike share a love of body art, piercings, and other body modifications.
The dawn of Christianity in early Rome around 350 AD spawned the first banning of tattoos by the emperor Constantine of Rome. Constantine was the one who decided to take Christianity from a persecuted clan of backwards believers into the "official" religion of the empire. Since Christians were now seeing themselves as created in the image and likeness of God, and that was a good thing, it was blasphemous to defile this image. It would be quite a while before tattoos depicting religious scenes and/or symbols became an accepted form of veneration for some faiths, but it is still frowned upon today in many religions, and even still banned in others.
Site referenced:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/tattoos-144038580/?page=1
