A Brief History Of Tattoos
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: enjoyment, entertainment, face painting, family, Fashion, gifts, history, holidays, leadership, other, society, tattooing, Uncategorized, warfare, womenThere are almost certainly as many individuals walking about with tattoos nowadays as ever there were at any other time in history. There was probably a lull in tattooing for a hundred years or so until the Nineties, but young people all over the world have taken to them like never before since the tribal days in the West. The big difference in the West is that young women are wearing tattoos too now.
The actual history of tattoos is very indistinct, their history is that long. The oldest tattoo that we have discovered so far is on Oetzi The Iceman, who died about 5,300 years ago. His tattoo was a simple grid of horizontal and vertical lines. However, tattooing was almost certainly going on long before Oetzi’s era. But what was their purpose?
One theory about Oetzi’s tattoos (all 57 of them) is that they were made on top of tender joints, so that an acupuncturist would better be able to insert needles into the correct places when his joints ached, but this is certainly not the only reason individuals had tattoos.
These days most Western tattoos are for decoration and it is likely that that has always been a fact, although warriors would have used them to appear more terrible in battle. They may also have been a symbol of social status.
I introduced to the mother of an Algerian-Berber friend of mine twenty years ago. She had lived on the top of her mountain alone for numerous years and I was honoured to be taken out to meet her. She was very small and petite and every inch of skin that I could see was tattooed. Her face, her hands and her feet.
When I asked my friend why she had had that done, he said that it was convention. She had once been the most beautiful woman in the region and so that everybody would understand that for long after she had lost her physical beauty, she was tattooed. It was an an expensive and lavish mark to say that she had been the most beautiful woman in that region in her day.
Russian archaeologists discovered mummies in the Altai Mountains of Siberia which were 2,400 years old. These individuals had animals tattooed all over them - some real and some imaginary animals. It is considered that some of these tattoos were ornamental and that others were signs of rank.
The Egyptians used tattoos freely and many mummies have been discovered that are completely covered in tattoos. Women were tattooed as well, but it is thought that solely women and the husband were permitted to see a woman’s markings These mummies go back 2,100 years.
Lots of Thai men have a large tattoo on their chest and on their back. These men have usually been in the army and the tattoo is supposed to stop them from being shot by staving off bullets. This is an ancient practice in Thailand and probably predates the invention of the gun.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on many subjects but is presently concerned with Hello Kitty from Japan. If you would like to read more, please go over to our web site entitled Kitten Cannon 3.
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