If you are a grad­u­ate of a U.S. school sys­tem, the words “Remem­ber the Lusi­ta­nia” may be as vague­ly famil­iar to you as “Remem­ber the Alamo.” And you may be just as fuzzy about the details. We learn rough­ly that the sink­ing of the British lux­u­ry lin­er was an act of Ger­man aggres­sion that moved the U.S. to enter World War I. That les­son is large­ly the result of a pro­pa­gan­da effort launched at the time to inflame anti-Ger­man sen­ti­ments and push the U.S. out of iso­la­tion­ism. But it would take almost two years after the attack before the coun­try entered the war. The Lusi­ta­nia did not change Pres­i­dent Woodrow Wilson’s posi­tion. While the “sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia was a cru­cial moment in help­ing to sway the Amer­i­can pub­lic in sup­port of the Allied cause,” it was only kept in the pub­lic eye by those who want­ed the U.S. in the war.

Main­stream U.S. cov­er­age imme­di­ate­ly after­ward was not over­ly bel­liger­ent. A week after the dis­as­ter, in a May 16th, 1915 issue, the Sun­day New York Times ran a two-page spread enti­tled “Promi­nent Amer­i­cans Who Lost Their Lives on the S.S. Lusi­ta­nia.” Two weeks lat­er, anoth­er pho­to spread hon­ored the ship’s dead, reflect­ing a “panora­ma of respons­es to the dis­as­ter,” the Library of Con­gress writes, includ­ing “sor­row, hero­ism, ambiva­lence, con­so­la­tion, and anger.”

These were emo­tion­al sur­veys of a tragedy, not inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism of an act of war. “Remark­ably,” the attack had “dom­i­nat­ed the head­lines for only about a week before being over­tak­en by a new­er sto­ry.” We might com­pare this to news of the Titan­ic dis­as­ter three years ear­li­er, cred­it­ed as “one of the first and most sig­nif­i­cant inter­na­tion­al news sto­ries of the 20th cen­tu­ry.” There is much about the Lusi­ta­nia the pub­lic did not learn, lead­ing to lat­er accu­sa­tions of a British Naval Intel­li­gence cov­er-up.

For one thing, sto­ries report­ed that the ship had been hit by two tor­pe­does when there was only one. Imme­di­ate­ly after its impact, how­ev­er, a sec­ondary explo­sion from inside the ship caused the Lusi­ta­nia to list per­ilous­ly to one side (ren­der­ing most lifeboats use­less) and take on water. Where the Titan­ic had tak­en 2 hours and 40 min­utes to go down, the Lusi­ta­nia sank in 18 min­utes — as you can see in the real-time ani­ma­tion above — killing approx­i­mate­ly 1,200 pas­sen­gers includ­ing around 120 Amer­i­cans. The sec­ond explo­sion lent cred­i­bil­i­ty to Ger­man accu­sa­tions that the pas­sen­ger ship was car­ry­ing muni­tions from New York to Britain. (Divers in a 1993 Nation­al Geo­graph­ic expe­di­tion found four mil­lion U.S.-made Rem­ing­ton bul­lets on board.) While this could not be proven at the time, the British had tak­en to hid­ing arms on pas­sen­ger ships, and the Lusi­ta­nia was out­fit­ted to be com­man­deered for war.

Not only did British author­i­ties put the Lusi­ta­nia in har­m’s way by allow­ing civil­ian pas­sen­gers to sail through block­ad­ed waters in which Ger­man sub­marines had been sink­ing mer­chant ships, but pas­sen­gers know­ing­ly put them­selves in dan­ger. The Ger­man High Com­mand had warned of attacks in Amer­i­can news­pa­pers in days before the ship set sail. Yet “only a cou­ple of peo­ple actu­al­ly can­celed,” says Erik Lar­son, author of the book Dead Wake: The Last Cross­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia. No war at sea or recent mem­o­ry of the Titan­ic could dis­suade them.

They saw this ship as so fast it could out­run any sub­ma­rine. They saw it as being so immense, so well built, so safe, and so well equipped with lifeboats in the wake of the Titan­ic dis­as­ter that even if it were hit by a tor­pe­do, no one imag­ined this thing actu­al­ly sink­ing. But no one could imag­ine a sub­ma­rine going after the Lusi­ta­nia in the first place.

Lar­son­’s last point sig­nals the crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence between this attack and all of those pre­vi­ous: the sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia was a shock­ing turn­ing point in the war, even if it did­n’t force Wilson’s hand as Churchill hoped. No one had expect­ed it. “In the his­to­ry of mod­ern war­fare,” the Library of Con­gress notes, the Lusi­ta­nia sig­naled “the end of the ‘gen­tle­man­ly’ war prac­tice of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and the begin­ning of a more omi­nous and vicious era of total war­fare.” While the Ger­mans ceased the prac­tice after British out­cry, they resumed the tar­get­ing of pas­sen­ger and mer­chant ships in 1917, final­ly prompt­ing U.S. involve­ment. The era that began with the Lusi­ta­nia con­tin­ues over a cen­tu­ry lat­er. Indeed, the wan­ton destruc­tion of civil­ian life no longer seems like trag­ic col­lat­er­al dam­age in cur­rent war zones, but the very point of wag­ing mod­ern war.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Titan­ic Sink in Real Time in a New 2‑Hour, 40 Minute Ani­ma­tion

Titan­ic Sur­vivor Inter­views: What It Was Like to Flee the Sink­ing Lux­u­ry Lin­er

The First Col­or Pho­tos From World War I: The Ger­man Front

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Some his­to­ries tell us more about their nar­ra­tors than their char­ac­ters. The sto­ry of tat­toos in ancient Egypt is one exam­ple. While tat­toos and oth­er forms of body mod­i­fi­ca­tion have been part of near­ly every ancient cul­ture, Egyp­tol­o­gists have found many more tat­tooed female than male mum­mies at ancient bur­ial sites. Since tat­too­ing seemed to be an almost “exclu­sive­ly female prac­tice in ancient Egypt,” writes arche­ol­o­gist Joann Fletch­er, “mum­mies found with tat­toos were usu­al­ly dis­missed by the (male) exca­va­tors who seemed to assume the women were of ‘dubi­ous sta­tus,’ described in some cas­es as ‘danc­ing girls.’ ”

There is no evi­dence, how­ev­er, to sug­gest that tat­toos in ancient Egypt specif­i­cal­ly marked dancers, pros­ti­tutes, con­cu­bines, or indi­vid­u­als of a low­er class (and thus of lit­tle inter­est to some ear­ly archae­ol­o­gists). One mum­my described as a con­cu­bine “was actu­al­ly a high-sta­tus priest­ess named Amunet, as revealed by her funer­ary inscrip­tions.” Ear­ly archae­ol­o­gists stub­born­ly clung to deroga­to­ry 19th-cen­tu­ry assump­tions about tat­toos (and class, danc­ing, sex, and reli­gion), even when dis­cussing tat­tooed Egypt­ian women whose buri­als obvi­ous­ly showed they were priest­esses or extend­ed mem­bers of a roy­al fam­i­ly.

Until rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly, “the most con­clu­sive evi­dence of Egypt­ian tat­toos,” writes Joshua Mark at the World His­to­ry Ency­clo­pe­dia, “dates the prac­tice to the Mid­dle King­dom” — span­ning the 11th through the 13th Dynas­ties (approx­i­mate­ly 2040 to 1782 BC). In 2018, how­ev­er, researchers at the British Muse­um took anoth­er look at two nat­u­ral­ly mum­mi­fied 5,000-year-old Pre­dy­nas­tic bod­ies, one male one female, dat­ing from between 3351 and 3017 BC. They looked specif­i­cal­ly for signs of body mod­i­fi­ca­tion that might have gone unseen by ear­li­er Egyp­tol­o­gists.

Known as the Gebelein pre­dy­nas­tic mum­mies, these bod­ies are two of six exca­vat­ed at the end of the 1800s by Egyp­tol­o­gist Sir Wal­lis Budge. Through the use of CT scan­ning, radio­car­bon dat­ing and infrared imag­ing, the British Muse­um has found that pre­vi­ous­ly unex­am­ined marks “push back the evi­dence for tat­too­ing in Africa by a mil­len­ni­um,” the Muse­um blog notes, describ­ing the find­ings in detail.

The male mum­my, called “Gebelein Man A,” showed a design on his bicep:

Dark smudges on his arm, appear­ing as faint mark­ings under nat­ur­al light, had remained unex­am­ined. Infrared pho­tog­ra­phy recent­ly revealed that these smudges were in fact tat­toos of two slight­ly over­lap­ping horned ani­mals. The horned ani­mals have been ten­ta­tive­ly iden­ti­fied as a wild bull (long tail, elab­o­rate horns) and a Bar­bary sheep (curv­ing horns, humped shoul­der). Both ani­mals are well known in Pre­dy­nas­tic Egypt­ian art. The designs are not super­fi­cial and have been applied to the der­mis lay­er of the skin, the pig­ment was car­bon-based, pos­si­bly some kind of soot.

The female mum­my, or “Gebelein Woman,” showed more intel­li­gi­ble mark­ings:

[A] series of four small ‘S’ shaped motifs can be seen run­ning ver­ti­cal­ly over her right shoul­der. Below them on the right arm is a lin­ear motif which is sim­i­lar to objects held by fig­ures par­tic­i­pat­ing in cer­e­mo­ni­al activ­i­ties on paint­ed ceram­ics of the same peri­od. It may rep­re­sent a crooked stave, a sym­bol of pow­er and sta­tus, or a throw-stick or baton/clappers used in rit­u­al dance. The ‘S’ motif also appears on Pre­dy­nas­tic pot­tery dec­o­ra­tion, always in mul­ti­ples.

In Mid­dle King­dom tat­too­ing prac­tices, a series of marks seemed to pro­vide pro­tec­tion, espe­cial­ly in fer­til­i­ty and child­birth rites, func­tion­ing as per­ma­nent amulets or a kind of prac­ti­cal mag­ic. Even if their mean­ings remain unclear, Marks writes, it does, “seem evi­dent that they had an array of impli­ca­tions and that women of many dif­fer­ent social class­es chose to wear them.” And it does seem clear that tat­too­ing was impor­tant to ancient, Pre­dy­nas­tic men and women, maybe for sim­i­lar rea­sons. Tat­too­ing tools have also been found dat­ing from around the same time as the Gebelein mum­mies, exca­vat­ed at Aby­dos and con­sist­ing of “sharp met­al points with a wood­en han­dle.”

The dat­ing of Gebelein Man A and Gebelein Woman place them as approx­i­mate con­tem­po­raries of Ötzi, a nat­u­ral­ly mum­mi­fied man cov­ered in tat­toos. Dis­cov­ered in 1991 on the bor­der of Aus­tria and Italy, Ötzi was pre­vi­ous­ly con­sid­ered the old­est tat­tooed mum­my. You can learn more about how the British Muse­um re-exam­ined the Gebelein bod­ies in the “Cura­tor’s Cor­ner” video above with cura­tor of phys­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gy Daniel Antoine. Read more about the find­ings at the British Muse­um’s blog and the Jour­nal of Archae­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Egypt­ian Sound­ed Like & How We Know It

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness