Mummy Tags

Discerning a mummified corpse form another can be quite a frustrating task indeed, even for the very people who did the process.
For this reason ancient egyptians invented the mummy tags! A mummy tag is a small piece of wood (or -seldom- stone) with a hole to tie it to the mummy itself on which they could write the late individual generalities: name, father's name, often the age, less often profession, year of death and sometimes a brief formula of farewell. In case the deceased had died far from home this tag also contained a sort of address to which "send" the mummy for burial, the name of who was to receive the body and wheter or not the shipment taxes had been payed.
These tags were rectangular or obelisk-like in shape and were in use between the seventh century b.C. and the seventh a.C.