Ancient War Victors Kept Severed Hands
Aristotle called the hand the “tool of tools”; Kant, “the visible part of the brain.” The earliest 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 discovery in 2011 of the bones of a dozen right hands, at a site where the ancient Egyptian city of Avaris (today known as Tell el-Dab’a) once stood, was particularly unsettling. The remains were unearthed, most with palms down, from pits near a royal palace. The hands, along with some fingers, were likely buried during Egypt’s 15th dynasty, from 1640 B.C. to 1530 B.C. At the time, Egypt’s eastern Nile Delta was controlled by a dynasty called the Hyksos, or “rulers of foreign countries.”
Although the Hyksos were described by the Ptolemaic Egyptian historian Manetho as “invaders of an obscure race” who conquered the region by force, recent research has shown that they descended from people who had immigrated peacefully over centuries from southwest Asia, now Israel and the Palestinian territories. A few rose to power as the Hyksos, based in Avaris.
The Hyksos are widely believed to have introduced the Egyptians to the horse and chariot, glass-working and all sorts of weaponry, including battle axes and composite bows. A recent study published in Nature proposes the Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which involved taking the hands of enemy combatants as war trophies.
The ritual was standard practice in Egypt, with soldiers returning from combat and presenting the right hands of defeated foes to their pharaoh or military commander.
“The amputations were a safe means to count slain enemies,” said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who collaborated on the paper. “They also made the dead enemy incapable of raising his hand again against Egypt in the Netherworld.”
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 attached to the hands, providing more information,” said Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Julia Gresky, a paleopathologist from the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, is confident that at least 11 hands were male. “Those 11 hands were large and robust,” she said. “The 12th was much smaller and possibly female. I’m quite optimistic that a woman was attached.”
Dr. Cooney said there are no records of women being soldiers in ancient Egypt. “This was a male sphere of action,” she said.
But Egyptian texts from the reign of Rameses III, from about 1186 B.C. to 1155 B.C., indicate that there were women in the Libyan Army.
All of the bones dug up in Avaris were fully formed but showed no signs of age-related degeneration, suggesting that the hands had belonged to individuals roughly between the ages of 14 and 30.
Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo who was not involved in the project, said that the new analysis “raises interesting questions about the origins of traditions showing dominance over enemies, not only in Egypt, but throughout the ancient world.”