What Can Fingerprints Tell Us About Ancient Artisans?
What Can Fingerprints Tell Us About Ancient Artisans?
Thousands of fingerprints and footprints survive from the ancient world, while the modern science of fingerprints to identify criminals has relatively recent and racist origins.
Sarah E. Bond 5 days ago
Ancient fingerprints and footprints maintain a visceral power to connect us — on a human level — to an individual from any time or place. Today, fingerprints from the ancient world survive as signs of humanity imprinted on the ceramics, waxen surfaces, or even cosmetic creams that survive from antiquity. But how did we come to view them as scientific signatures that could be used to identify criminals or lost children? What role does fingerprint analysis play in archaeology today? The science and pseudoscience surrounding the study of fingerprints has a long history.
The modern study of fingerprints in order to identify humans is called dactylography, a technical field which takes its name from the Greek word for finger, δάκτυλος. Hundreds of ancient prints have been transmitted via objects dating back to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond. For instance, a number of prints survive on tablets from Sumerian scribal schools called edubas, which trained scribes to write in cuneiform during the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE). In comments to Hyperallergic, Moudhy Al-Rashid, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, remarked on the prevalence of such imprints on cuneiform tablets:
Clay tablet are not easy to shape or inscribe without smudging. In Nippur, a scribal school known as “House F” provides some archaeological information about the physical environment for education in Babylonia. Students made rough drafts. Particularly at the beginnings of their scribal careers, while first coming to grips with the medium of clau, they would have impressed as many fingerprints as wedges. Writing, after all, is a physical act.
As Dr. Al-Rashid notes, even seasoned scribes could have a slip of the hand and leave their own fingerprints on a document. Quickly written receipts or jotted exercises on clay tablets meant that the clay was often not as smoothed and polished as, say, a copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh for the Royal Library would be. Frustrated writers sometimes even bit into tablets. An Old Babylonian school text from Nippur has a cuneiform lexical text, but also has teeth marks from a young student, age 12 to 13. Al-Rashid notes the student may have bitten into the tablet in order to break it in half.
More:
https://hyperallergic.com/491765/what-can-fingerprints-tell-us-about-ancient-artisans/