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