Predynastic Female Figure with a Beaked Face

Between about 3700 and 3300 BC, in the period archaeologists call Naqada II, Egypt had no writing yet and no single king. People along the Nile shaped small figures of women in clay and stone, and many of them share the face you see here, pinched into a point like a bird's beak. What these figures meant is not known. Scholars connect them with ritual, partly because some carry painted animals and other signs on their bodies.

The museum's own title for this seated woman says that her thighs are tattooed. For a long time, markings like these on figurines could only be compared with other images. Then in 2018 researchers using infrared light on two naturally preserved bodies from late Predynastic Egypt, now in the British Museum, found real tattoos under the skin. The man had a wild bull and a Barbary sheep on his upper arm, and the woman a row of S-shaped motifs on her shoulder. This figure was bought for Turin in 1900 or 1901, and where it was found is not recorded.