Aristotle called the hand the “tool of tools”; Kant, “the visible part of the brain”. The oldest works of art were handprints on the walls of caves. Throughout history, hand gestures have symbolized the range of human experience: power, tenderness, creativity, conflict, even (thanks to Michelangelo) the touch of the divine. Without hands, civilization would be inconceivable.
And so the The bones of a dozen right hands were discovered in 2011 at a site where the ancient Egyptian city of Avaris once stood (today known as Tell el-Dab’a), was particularly disturbing. The remains were unearthed, most palms down, from pits near a royal palace. The hands, along with some fingers, were probably buried during Egypt’s Fifteenth Dynasty, from 1640 BC to 1530 BC. At that time, Egypt’s eastern Nile Delta was controlled by a dynasty called the Hyksos, or “rulers of foreign countries.” ”.
Although the Ptolemaic Egyptian historian Manetho described the Hyksos as “invaders from a little-known race” who conquered the region by force, recent research has shown that they were descended from peoples who had migrated peacefully over centuries from Southwest Asia, now Israel, and the Palestinian territories. A few rose to power as the Hyksos, based at Avaris.
A recent study published in Nature proposes that the Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which consisted of taking the hands of enemy combatants as trophies of war.
The ritual was standard practice in Egypt, with soldiers returning from combat and presenting the right hands of defeated enemies to their pharaoh or military commander.
“Amputations were a safe means of counting fallen enemies.said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who collaborated on the study. “It also made the dead enemy unable to raise a hand against Egypt in the Underworld again.”.
Tomb inscriptions and temple reliefs describe the ceremony, but the new study, by German and Austrian researchers and drawn from an analysis of skeletal remains, offers the first physical evidence of it.
“Flesh and nails are still present on the hands, which provides more information,” said Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Julia Gresky, a paleopathologist at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, is confident that at least 11 hands were male. “Those 11 hands were big and robust,” she said. “The twelfth was much smaller and possibly female. I’m pretty optimistic that she belonged to a woman.”
None of the bones at Avaris showed signs of age-related degeneration, suggesting that the hands had belonged to people between the ages of approximately 14 and 30. Some Egyptologists had theorized that the amputation was punishment for criminals, but Gresky said the location, level of care and positioning argued they were trophies of war.
Except for particularly egregious offenses, such as robbing the tombs of pharaohs, amputation of hands was a rare punishment in ancient Egypt, which is why Bietak said the hands were unlikely to belong to criminals.
But why cut off the right hand? “The right hand is generally the dominant hand for activity—for writing, working, and fighting.Cooney said. “Cutting it off a living person is a method of imposing violent control and potentially leaving the victim of such a split alive for all to see, as a walking advertisement not to antagonize people in power.”
By: Franz Lidz
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6725619, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-22 22:10:07
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