Tattooing

Etymology

The word comes from the Tahitien tatau , which means to mark or to draw . The root of the word, your returns to the verbs to strike, to incise . Doctor Berchon, translator of the second voyage of Cook towards Tahiti in 1772 employed for the first time the word Tatoo . In 1858, the word was officially francized in Tatouage and made its appearance in the dictionary of Littré.

History

To tattoo is a practice attested in Eurasia since the Neolithic era. “Ötzi”, the man of the ices discovered cold in the italo-Austrian Alps died towards -3 500. He raises therapeutic tattooings (small parallel features along the lumbar ones and on the legs). The Bassin of Tarim (Xinjiang in China) revealed several tattooed mummies of physical type European. Still badly known (only accessible work in Western language is those of J.P. Mallory and V.H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies , London, 2000), some of them could date from the end of the 2nd millenium before our era. Three tattooed mummies were extracted from the permafrost of the Altaï in second half of the 20th century (the Man of Payzyrk in the Forties; late of the plate of Ukok in the Nineties). Their tattooings implement an animalist repertory carried out in a curvilinear style virtuoso.

Tattooing will be badly considered in the Occidental culture because of the judgments Judeo-Christians which surround it: Levitique 19:28 (Old Testament) " You will not be made incisions on the body because of a death and you will not make draw tattooings on the body. I am Eternel." (Rites practiced by the Egyptians and certain people of the Middle East)

Europeans have redécouvert tattooing during explorations in the Pacifique southern with the captain James Cook in the years 1770 and the sailors in particular were particularly identified with these marks in the European culture until after the Second world war. These same European sailors often tattooed a crucifix on all the back in order to secure scourging in the event of punishment. Because it was a crime to disfigure a holy picture…

This system of identification was also a means on and effective of information of the cards of the police force on the underworld before the arrival of the photograph of identity. The cards of police forces until the XIXe century comprised the indication and the description of each tattooing which thus made it possible to characterize without error an individual.

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