In Ancient Egypt, Severed Hands Were Spoils of War

Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist on the American University in Cairo who was not concerned within the mission, stated that the brand new evaluation “raises interesting questions about the origins of traditions showing dominance over enemies, not only in Egypt, but throughout the ancient world.”

‘Fish in baskets’

The historical Egyptians are honored for his or her achievements in artwork, structure, and know-how. But their brutal custom of maiming criminals and adversaries predates the Hyksos by greater than a millennium. Perjurers have been typically disciplined by slicing off their ears and noses; insurgents, by impaling the our bodies on the ribs till dying. The Narmer Palette, a ceremonial engraving that dates to the time of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt about 5,000 years in the past, exhibits the beheading and mutilation of what have been apparently rival chieftains.

On one aspect of the palette, King Narmer holds a mace aloft in his proper hand whereas along with his left he yanks a kneeling captive by the hair. “The smiting motif would have been a public display of King Narmer’s power over his enemy, smashing the skull to bloody bits,” Dr. Cooney stated.

On the reverse aspect, the king inspects rows of sure, decapitated corpses with their heads between their legs, and their castrated penises atop their heads. “Dismemberment was anathema to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted their bodies whole for a materialized afterlife existence,” Dr. Cooney stated.

A reduction within the mortuary temple of Rameses III, at Medinet Habu, exhibits the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory not removed from heaps of his enemies’ severed phalluses (12,312, based on one translation of zealous military scribes) and palms (24,625). In the temple of Amun at Karnak, a chronicle of a thirteenth century B.C. battle particulars prisoners being introduced again to the pharaoh Merneptah with “donkeys before them, laden with uncircumcised penises of the Land of Libya, with the hands of [every] foreign land that was with them, as fish in baskets.” If the tally of fatalities is to be believed, the Egyptians collected the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised enemy useless and the palms of two,362 circumcised enemies. “The stink must have been awful, and thus the ‘fish in baskets’ comment,” Dr. Cooney stated.