In ancient Egypt, severed hands were spoils of war – 05/18/2023 – Science

Aristotle described the hand as “the tool of tools”. For Immanuel Kant, it was “the visible part of the brain”. The first works of art were handprints on cave walls. Throughout history, hand gestures have symbolized the full range of human experience: power, tenderness, creativity, conflict, even the divine touch (bravo, Michelangelo!). Without hands, civilization would be inconceivable.

So the discovery in 2011 of the bones of a dozen right hands at an archaeological site now known as Tell el-Dab’a, once the ancient Egyptian city of Avaris, was especially disturbing. The remains were unearthed, most palms down, from three shallow graves near the throne room of a royal palace. The hands, in addition to several disjointed fingers, were probably buried during the 15th Dynasty of Egypt, between 1640 BC and 1530 BC The eastern part of the Nile Delta in Egypt was controlled at the time by a dynasty known as the Hyksos, or “Hyksos”. rulers of foreign lands”.

The Hyksos were described by the Ptolemaic Egyptian historian Manetho as “invaders of an obscure race” who conquered the region by force, but recent research indicates that they were descended from migrants who came peacefully over centuries from southwest Asia—present-day Israel and Palestinian territories. Over time, some of them came to power like the Hyksos, centralizing their power in Avaris.

The Hyksos are believed to have introduced the horse and chariot to Egypt, the manufacture of glass, and weapons of various types, including battle axes and composite bows (constructed of various materials). A recent study published in the journal Nature proposes that the Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which involved taking the hands of enemy combatants as trophies of war.

The ritual seems to have become common practice in Egypt. Upon returning from combat, soldiers would present to their pharaoh or military commander the severed right hands of defeated opponents.

“Amputated hands were a sure way to count enemy dead,” said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who collaborated on the article. “And left the dead enemy unable to fight again against Egypt in the underworld.”

Inscriptions on tombs and bas-reliefs in temples describe the sinister public ceremony, but the new study, by a team of German and Austrian researchers and based on an analysis of skeletal remains, provides the first physical evidence of its occurrence.

“The amputations were performed surgically, with meticulous care,” said Kara Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA. “There’s still flesh and nails on the hands, providing more information.”

In 2011 the fragile hands were hardened with acetone-soluble glue so that they could be lifted out of the ground in a plaster cast. Poorly preserved, they could not be genetically tested. Paleopathologist Julia Gresky of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin determined their biological sex using a non-invasive method: comparing the length of the index finger with the length of the ring finger.

“Men’s ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers,” Gresky said. “For women, it’s usually the other way around.”

Some critics consider this criterion simplistic and unreliable, but Gresky is confident that at least 11 of the 12 hands were men’s. “These 11 hands were big and beefy,” she said. “The 12th hand is much smaller and possibly feminine. I’m pretty sure it was a woman’s.”

Cooney notes that there are no records indicating that women were combatants in ancient Egypt. “War was a male sphere,” she said. But Egyptian texts from the reign of Ramses III, roughly between 1186 BC and 1155 BC, indicate that there were women in the Libyan army.

All of the bones unearthed at Avaris were fully formed, but show no signs of age-related degeneration, suggesting they would have belonged to people between the ages of 14 and 30. Some Egyptologists had theorized that the dismemberment was a barbaric punishment meted out to criminals, but Gresky considers that the location, degree of care, and possibly the positioning of the severed hands indicate that they would have been trophies of war.

Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University of Cairo who was not involved in the project, said the new analysis “raises interesting questions about the origins of traditions that show dominance over enemies, not just in Egypt but throughout the ancient world.”

‘Fish in baskets’

The ancient Egyptians are revered for their achievements in art, architecture and technology. But their brutal tradition of maiming criminals and adversaries predates the Hyksos by more than a millennium. Perjurers (people who bear false witness) sometimes had their noses and ears cut off as punishment. Insurgents were impaled between the ribs until they died. The Palette of Narmer, a ceremonial engraved plaque dating from the time of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt some 5,000 years ago, shows the beheading and mutilation of people who appear to have been chieftains of rival tribes.

On one side of the palette, King Narmer raises a club in his right hand, while with his left he pulls a kneeling prisoner by the hair. “The image of the smiting would have been a public demonstration of King Narmer’s power over his enemy, crushing his skull to pieces,” Cooney said.

On the back of the palette the king inspects rows of bound and decapitated corpses, with the heads placed between their legs and their castrated penises over the heads. “Dismemberment was a curse to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted their bodies whole for a materialized afterlife,” Cooney said.

A bas-relief in the mortuary temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu shows the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory, just a short distance away from piles of severed phalluses and hands of his enemies (12,312 phalluses and 24,625 hands, according to a translation of the careful record made by army scribes).

In the temple of Amun at Karnak, a chronicle of a 13th-century BC battle details prisoners being led back to Pharaoh Merneptah with “donkeys in front of them laden with uncircumcised penises from the land of Libya and hands from all the foreign lands that were with them.” them like fish in baskets”.

If the death count is to be believed, the Egyptians harvested the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised dead enemies and the hands of 2,362 circumcised enemies. “The stench should have been awful, which would have been the reason for the ‘fish in baskets’ comment,” Cooney said.

the wrong hand

With the exception of especially heinous crimes, such as stealing from the tombs of pharaohs, amputation of hands was a rare punishment in ancient Egypt, which is why Bietak said the hands found at Avaris are unlikely to have been those of criminals. But such deceptions were a relatively common theme in military scenes of the New Kingdom, which began in the 16th century BC and lasted nearly 500 years.

Bietak, who has led excavations at Tell el-Dab’a since 1966, said the Egyptians appear to have adopted the custom between 50 and 80 years earlier than evidence from inscriptions and images indicates. A bas-relief in the temple of Ahmose I at Abydos shows a pile of severed hands on a battlefield. Ahmose I was the king who conquered Avaris and defeated the Hyksos.

Were the hands found in Avaris severed from still-living victims or from recently dead people? “When they were placed in the pits, the hands should have been flexible and soft enough that they could be stretched out and brought into a presentable position,” Gresky said. “This indicates that they would have been placed there before the onset of rigor mortis or when it had passed.” Probably later, she figures; the hands must have been collected and held for some time before being placed in the pit. “If it was before,” said Gesky, “the amputations were done just before or even during the offering ceremony.”

For Gresky, the most likely is that the hands would have been severed without great care between one and four days after death. She noted that the graves would have been visible from the palace’s throne room, which points to a public ceremony and reinforces the hypothesis that the hands were spoils of war.

Why cut off the right hand? “The right hand is usually the dominant one, used for writing, working and fighting,” Cooney said. “Cutting it off from a living person is a means of imposing violent control and possibly leaving the victim of this excision alive for all to see — a walking warning to anyone thinking of challenging those in power.”

^{Translated by Clara Allain}