The role of tattooing in ancient Greek & Roman times, sometimes referred to as ‘tattooing’s dark age’ (i) is quickly addressed in the latest body/art encyclopedia update (ii)
 
 
| ‘Tattooing was widely practiced among the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean, primarily as a form of punishment for criminals, leading to the modern Western association of tattoos, criminality, and the underclass. Originally, the Greeks did not use tattooing and saw it as a barbaric practice. Contempories of the Greeks who did use tattooing included the Thracians (of Bulgaria and western Turkey), the Egyptians, the Syrians, and the Persians. Tattooing for these groups probably served multiple purposes. The Syrians, for instance, wore tattoos on their wrists that had a sacred significance and runaway slaves who received sacred designs were considered to now serve the divinity rather than their former masters and were freed of service. Thracian tattoo usage found on both men and women could have been decorative as well as serving social purposes. Egyptian tattoos were worn by women and were both decorative and used for ritual purposes. The Persians tattooed slaves and prisoners of war and this was perhaps the source for later Greek tattooing.
 
The Greeks picked up the practice of tattooing in the fifth century BCE and began following the Persian practice of using tattoo marks for punitive purposes. The Greeks tattooed both prisoners and runaway slaves on the forehead, usually with a mark demonstrating their crime. The term stigmata was used to describe tattoo marks by the Greeks and later the Romans. The Romans inherited punitive tattooing from the Greeks and later began marking soldiers as well. They also used branding to mark animals (as did the Greeks) and human slaves, as did the Egyptians. Like the Persians who often tattooed slaves and prisoners with the name of the king, the Romans sometimes marked slaves with the name of their owner. Prisoners of war and soldiers alike were tattooed with the name of the emperor (and soldiers were sometimes marked with a series of dots which may have represented their unit) and many criminals were marked with the sentence rather than the crime… | full article
 

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