INSCRIBED BODIES IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Originally, Mesopotamian physiognomists may have found the inspiration for their interest in graphemes “inscribed” on the human body in their everyday experience of encountering (runaway) slaves, prisoners, and temple oblates who were tattooed or branded104 with the names of their owners (or the institution they belonged to), or with some other inscription.
Skin is “the most obvious canvas upon which human differences can be written and read,”105 and it is therefore not surprising that the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, like the people of later ages, used it in this capacity, and, in addition to finding on it imaginary signs, also inscribed it with real ones.A Mesopotamian branding iron from the third millennium(?) that was used to apply the name of a certain Duggani on cattle or slaves to document his ownership claims is the most tangible testimony of the gruesome but widespread practice of branding; it is also the oldest object of its kind.106 A passage in Ana ittisu, a collection of legal phrases reflecting judicial
customs of the Old Babylonian period, includes the words: halaq sabat inapanisu iqqur “‘He is a runaway, seize him,’ he engraved (i.e., tattooed?) on his (the slave’s) face,”107 an entry that provides clear proof that in the first half of the second millennium, fugitive slaves could carry cuneiform signs on precisely the same body part that is analyzed in Alamdimmu III and K. 2087(+). In the first millennium, such signs were apparently more often tattooed on the hands and wrists of slaves, but their faces could still be inscribed as well.108 A letter from Nineveh (Parpola 1993: no. 160) mentions an eminent scholar and exorcist who, for unknown reasons, had become a fugitive from Assyria and, now apparently a slave, “was inscribed on his face and hand” (pa-ni-su u r[i]t-ti-su sat-ru, rev.
11). One can only hope that this pitiful man found a way to use his learnedness to discover some auspicious meaning behind the characters that were so crudely written on his body. A bill of sale from Borsippa dated to the reign of Xerxes mentions a slave “who is inscribed with the name of his owner... on the right and left (hand?) and on the cheek (letu) of his left and right side,”109 indicating that the body part analyzed in the physiognomic treatise KAR 395, namely the cheek, could be inscribed in a very literal sense as well. The slaves and temple oblates of the Neo-Babylonian and Late Babylonian period could carry inscriptions in cuneiform, Aramaic, and even Egyptian characters, but they were also often marked with symbols, for example, a star representing the goddess Istar that signaled an ownership claim of the Eanna temple in Uruk.110 * Sometimes, slaves became, quite literally, human palimpsests, inscribed with the symbols or names of their successive owners one above the other.111 Given how widespread the practice was to tattoo Babylonian slaves, it is certainly not by chance that the famous Greek playwright Aristophanes, in his (mostly lost) comedy “The Babylonians” from 426 B.C., seems to apply to Babylonians emerging from a mill the term polygrdmmatos “(multi)-lettered,” apparently referring to slave marks on their foreheads.112Tattooing and branding were also known in ancient Israel and the classical world. Leviticus 19:28, using the word ktbt, which refers to writing, contains a prohibition against tattooing of the human body, while Isaiah 44:5, quite in contrast to this injunction, anticipates the glorious times when an Israelite “shall write on his hand: ‘the Lord’s.’” Since Isaiah 40-55 reflects experiences of the Babylonian exile, it is quite feasible that the quoted passage was inspired by encounters between Judeans and Babylonian temple oblates whose hands bore inscriptions or symbols referring to the religious institution they belonged to.
Finally, in Ezekiel 9:4, god tells a faithful angelic scribe: “Go through the midst of the city, the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark (lit., mark [the grapheme?] Tau) upon the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.” Again, a Babylonian backgroundseems possible, and it cannot, in fact, be excluded that some popular form of Mesopotamian physiognomies informed this enigmatic passage.113 A Jewish treatise describing twelve or thirteen Hebrew letters observed on the forehead of a man, and what they meant with regard to his character and destiny, is known from a manuscript from the Cairo Genizah. The exact origins of the treatise remain obscure (it is ascribed to Rabbi Ishmael, who lived in the late first and early second century A.D.), but the parallels with the Babylonian texts presented above are of course rather intriguing.114
As for the classical world, it seems that the Greeks borrowed tattooing for identification and punishment from the Babylonians and Persians and used it in ways very similar to theirs, as did the Romans who borrowed it from the Greeks. In Greece and Rome, penal tattoos, called stigmata, a term later applied to the wounds of the crucified Jesus, marked primarily the forehead, the neck, and the wrists of slaves, much like in Mesopotamia.115 Reiner (2004) has pointed out that according to a scholion to Aeschines, the forehead of a runaway slave was marked with the Greek words kdtekhe me, pheugo “Seize me — I am a runaway,” a phrase almost exactly identical with the phrase halaq sabat used on the forehead of fugitive slaves in Mesopotamia according to the Ana ittisu passage quoted above. Roman slaves could wear a ring around their neck inscribed with the same words in Latin, fugi tene me.