Gebelein

Gebelein — Arabic for 'the two mountains' — is an archaeological site on the west bank of the Nile south of Luxor, built over the ancient Egyptian city of Inerty. The site once housed a sanctuary of the cow goddess Hathor, which gave it the epithet 'House of Hathor' in ancient texts. It gained global attention through a pair of predynastic mummies now held in the British Museum: dated to roughly 3350–3100 BCE, they bear the oldest known figurative tattoos in the world — a bull and a wild sheep on the male body, curving S-shapes on the female — pushing the history of tattooing back several millennia. The site remains largely unexcavated and difficult to access independently, making it primarily a destination for specialists in Egyptology and predynastic research.