Earliest evidence of ancient tattoos found on the Iceman and Egyptian mummies

Story: 3200 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 9, 0001

A frozen body discovered near the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 quietly upended everything historians thought they knew about the origins of body art. The man inside the ice — now known as Ötzi the Iceman — was carbon-dated to around 3200 B.C.E., making him the oldest known tattooed human being. His markings didn’t look like decoration. They looked like medicine.

What the evidence shows

• Ancient tattoos: Ötzi the Iceman, dating to ~3200 B.C.E., carries 61 tattoos — dots and crosses clustered around his lower spine, knee, and ankle joints, areas showing signs of arthritis and strain.
• Egyptian tattooing: Mummified women buried at Deir el-Bahari, dated to ~2000 B.C.E., bear dotted and geometric patterns across the abdomen, thighs, and breasts, suggesting a protective or therapeutic function during pregnancy and birth.
• Tattooing tools: Sharp-pointed implements found at Abydos, Egypt, date to ~3000 B.C.E., while bronze needle bundles discovered at the ancient town of Gurob date to ~1450 B.C.E. — both consistent with tattoo application.

A body as a map of meaning

Ötzi’s tattoos weren’t placed at random. Researchers who examined him — including specialists at the University of York — noted that the tattooed dots and crosses correspond almost precisely to areas of his skeleton showing degenerative joint disease. The placement matches acupuncture points used in traditional East Asian medicine, raising the possibility that tattooing as a form of pain relief was discovered independently across multiple cultures, thousands of years apart.

That parallel is one of the most compelling details in the early history of ancient tattoos. It suggests that humans in widely separated regions arrived at similar solutions to similar problems — not because they copied each other, but because they were all paying close attention to the human body.

In Egypt, the evidence points in a related direction. Archaeological findings from Deir el-Bahari, opposite modern Luxor, show that several high-status women — including a priestess named Amunet — were buried with tattooed markings across their abdomens and thighs. For decades, male excavators dismissed these women as “dancing girls” or assumed the marks indicated low social standing. The funerary inscriptions told a different story: these were priests and elites, buried in proximity to royalty.

Researcher Joann Fletcher of the University of York argues that the tattoo patterns on Egyptian women — particularly the net-like distribution of dots across the abdomen — likely functioned as protective amulets during pregnancy and childbirth. As the abdomen expanded, the pattern would spread with it, mirroring the bead nets placed over mummified bodies to hold them safe. Small figures of the household deity Bes, protector of women in labor, appeared at the tops of the thighs. The placement was deliberate. The meaning was clear.

Tattooing across the ancient world

Egypt and the Alps were not alone. The Nubian C-group culture, from communities south of Egypt near modern Sudan, left behind mummified women bearing blue tattoos — including the same dot arrangements found on Egyptian mummies — dating to around 2000–1500 B.C.E. The practice was shared, or arrived at independently, across the Nile corridor.

Far to the northeast, in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, Scythian Pazyryk peoples buried their dead with extraordinarily elaborate tattoos. A male body discovered in 1948, dating to around 400 B.C.E., was covered in ornate animals — mythical creatures rendered in continuous flowing lines across limbs and torso. A woman found in 1993 carried similar imagery on her shoulders, wrists, and thumb. The Greek historian Herodotus recorded that among the Scythians and Thracians, tattoos marked nobility. The untattooed were considered lowborn.

Ancient Britons tattooed themselves with “divers shapes of beasts,” according to Roman accounts — so consistently that the Romans named one northern tribe the Picti, meaning “the painted people.” The Inuit used tattoos that incorporated yellow pigments alongside darker ones. The Maori developed tā moko, a system of facial tattooing encoding genealogy, rank, and identity into the skin itself — one of the most complex tattoo traditions in the world, still practiced and revitalized today.

Lasting impact

What Ötzi and the Egyptian mummies gave the world was not a beginning — tattooing almost certainly predates both — but a window. Their preserved bodies offer the earliest surviving physical proof that humans have long used permanent marks on skin to heal, protect, identify, and commemorate.

The downstream consequences of this recognition have been significant. Museum collections and academic departments that once overlooked tattooing as a subject of serious study now treat it as a legitimate lens into human culture, medicine, spiritual life, and social organization. The high-status women of Deir el-Bahari, long misread as marginal figures, have been reinterpreted as practitioners of a meaningful healing tradition. The Iceman’s dots, once puzzling, now fit into a broader story about how humans have always tried to care for bodies under strain.

Tattooing today is practiced across nearly every culture on Earth. Its forms range from the ancient therapeutic to the contemporary personal — a continuous thread running from a frozen Alpine body to a tattoo parlor open right now, somewhere, in every major city in the world.

Blindspots and limits

The archaeological record for tattooing is thin by necessity: skin rarely survives. The examples we have — preserved by ice, extreme aridity, or exceptional burial conditions — are almost certainly unrepresentative of how widespread the practice was. Women’s tattooing in Egypt was systematically misread for generations by excavators who brought their own assumptions to the evidence, and it is reasonable to wonder what else has been dismissed or overlooked. The story of ancient tattoos is, in large part, a story of what does not survive.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Smithsonian Magazine — The Tattoo’s Permanent Past

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous communities secure historic land rights protections
• Ghana establishes marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• The Good News for Humankind archive on the ancient world

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