Severed hands found outside an ancient Egyptian palace confirm accounts of a trophy-taking custom called the “gold of honor.”
In 2011, archaeologists excavating a site in northern Egypt known as Tell el-Dab’a came across a grisly scene. As they probed a series of pits outside the city’s palace walls, 12 skeletal hands reached back at them.are likely a cache of battlefield trophies
The hands were dated to 1500 B.C.E., when Tell el-Dab’a was known as Avaris and briefly served as the capital of ancient Egypt. When Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who has led digs at Tell el-Dab’a for decades, first saw the remains, he immediately thought of the trophy-taking ritual.
The care also suggests the hands were removed after death, not hacked from living prisoners. They were probably severed after rigor mortis–a tightening of the tendons in the hours after death–had passed, Gresky argues. Otherwise, it would have been difficult to cut the tendons connecting hand to arm without leaving marks on the bones.
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