Ancient Egyptians Might Have Used Branding Irons on Human Slaves

A new research study proposes that small branding irons from ancient Egypt were most likely used to mark the skin of enslaved people.

New research indicates that small branding irons from ancient Egypt were most likely used to mark the skin of human slaves.

Numerous ancient texts, depictions, and ten branding irons dating to 3,000 years ago propose that ancient Egyptians branded slaves. These branding irons, made from bronze, are currently in the British Museum and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology collections at University College London.

The branding irons are thought to date approximately to Egypt’s 19th dynasty, from around 1292 B.C. until the 25th dynasty, which ended in 656 B.C., according to research released Oct. 15 in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.

Previously, most Egyptologists had presumed that they were used to brand cattle- a practice seen in ancient Egyptian paintings- or horses. However, the brands in the museums are too small for that goal, stated Ella Karev, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago and the study’s author.

According to Karev, they are so tiny that it precludes them from being utilized on livestock or horses. They will not rule out the possibility, yet we have no evidence of little animals like goats being branded, and there is so much various other evidence of humans being branded.

Modern cattle-branding guidelines call for a brand larger than at least 4 inches (10.6 centimeters) long so the mark it leaves will not get illegible as a calf grows– an issue that the ancient Egyptians most likely knew about, as well.

The brands in the British Museum and the Petrie Museum are usually a third of that size– far too little for cattle, Karev composed. The livestock brands in ancient Egyptian paintings are likewise square or rectangular and appear larger than the brands in the museums.

Branding humans

A number of the ancient Egyptian branding irons are virtually the same size as branding irons utilized by Europeans on African enslaved people during the trans-Atlantic slave trade several centuries later, Karev said. “Human branding irons from the mid-and late 19th century parallel the size and shape of the smaller-sized branding irons talked about here,” she wrote in the research study.

Ancient Egyptian writings additionally mention “marking” enslaved people, which was thought to be a reference to the practice of tattooing, Karev informed Live Science. Branding is seen in a depiction of prisoners of war in sculpting at Medinet Habu near Luxor in Upper (southern) Egypt, dated to the 20th dynasty, maybe around 1185 B.C.

She said that research shows that tattooing in ancient Egypt was almost exclusively done on women and for religious purposes. The marking of prisoners of war in the Medinet Habu sculpting is unlikely to be tattooing.

“Practically speaking, ‘hand-poking’ a tattoo [without a tattoo machine] takes rather a great deal of time and skill– and if you are doing that on a large scale, it is not easily replicable,” Karev stated. “It would certainly make much more sense for this to be branding.”

In addition, the tools utilized to mark the prisoners in the Medinet Habu sculpting look different from the cattle brands utilized in ancient Egyptian paintings. It has been advised that’s because they were needles for tattooing and that the carving presents them positioned in a bowl of pigment. Karev argues that the depiction alternatively shows small brands being heated up to red hot in a mobile heater known as a brazier.

Egyptian slavery

The practice of slavery in Egypt differed from the modern-day perception of slavery informed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Karev stated.

According to Karev, how we define slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, debt bondage are modern-day classifications and categorizations. The ancient Egyptians did not have these classifications. Therefore it depends on historians to determine what, in context, is actually going on.

While ancient writings mention that individuals were occasionally bought and sold as property, and possibly with the land they subsisted on– what is called “serfs” today– there’s likewise evidence that their owner could pay the dowry for marriage of a slave and that numerous slaves were adopted into households.

On top of that, there is evidence that individuals were commonly manumitted or freed from slavery, and became normal members of Egyptian society, she claimed.

In such cases, the brand of an enslaved person may be a “permanent pen of a temporary status,” Karev said. “They obviously had no issue with an ex-slave adopting a new name, becoming completely Egyptian, marrying an Egyptian free individual, and going up the ranks.”

Antonio Loprieno, an Egyptologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland who wasn’t involved in the research study, stated the paper was a “wonderful piece of scholarship.”

Just foreigners, as opposed to native Egyptians, seem to have actually been marked this way, so “thinking that the branding-bronzes were used for people … is empirically much more possible at this time, where the number of foreign workers and soldiers in Egypt was at its summit,” he told Live Science in an email.

Loprieno, too, noted that modern concept of slavery did not apply in Egypt at this time which additional evidence is required of the “moral connotations” of slavery in ancient Egypt.

Read the original article on Live Science.

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