Iranian Tunics for Plataea

If you want to go to the reenactment event at Plataia (currently scheduled for 26-31 July 2022), the most important things are shoes, clothing, and something to sleep on and eat from. And the most important site for those things is the sale mine at Chehrābād, Zanjan province, Iran. This mine was worked from 700-400 BCE, then from 300 to 600 CE, then from the 17th century to the 20th century. North-West Iran suffers from earthquakes, and bad earthquakes buried some of the miners and their possessions. As of 2016, six salt mummies had been found from the Achaemenid and Sasanid periods. Just like the salt mines at Halstatt, Austria, the salt at Chehrabad preserves things which rot in air and wet. Since the 2010s, the objects from this site have been examined by a joint European-Iranian team with resources to do things like scan the mummies with a CT machine. So far, 600 pieces of textiles have been catalogued. The following post is based on a lecture in German by Dr. Karina Grömer of the Naturhistorisches Museum, Wien, at the University of Innsbruck on 18 January 2016. I delayed posting it partially because I was too sick and busy to make the illustrations, and partially because I was ashamed that I made a mistake in my article on the trousers from Chehrabad. I will continue to edit this post as I have time to make, scan, and clean up illustrations.

The best preserved mummy is number 4, a man of 15 to 20 years old who died in the 5th century BCE. His body and equipment are almost as well preserved as Ötzi and his equipment in Austria. He wears a sleeved tunic of wool woven in one piece with a slit for the neck. It is decorated with red woolen borders along the side seams, hem, and sleeve ends. The side seams pass through the front of the tunic, the red border, and the back of the tunic. The hemp shirt from Pazyryk barrow 2 has its seams decorated the same way. But the shirt from Pazyruk belongs to the northern tradition of cut and sewed clothing, while this tunic belongs to the southern tradition of clothes woven to shape. To make sure you understand what I mean, lets step back and look at the broader context.

Some clothing is woven or knit in its final shape, and other clothing is cut from a long piece of cloth and sewed back together. The cut clothes can be further divided into types made mainly from rectangles, rhombuses and triangles like 19th century Japanese clothing, and types made from more complicated shaped like 19th century European clothes. Clothes which are woven to shape can just be wrapped and pinned in place (like a towel or scarf) or they can be sewed edge to edge. In the Iron Age, cut clothes were typical of ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ Europe and the eastern parts of the Eurasian steppes, while clothes in the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia were traditionally woven to shape. Cultures which cut their clothes tended to use both twill and plain weaves, while peoples which wrapped their clothes relied on plain weaves. Northern barbarians and people in the Sasanid empire popularized cut clothes and twill weaves in the Christian Roman world. In ancient West Eurasia, clothes which were woven to shape were often rotated 90 degrees between hanging on the loom and hanging on the body. Veronika Gervers calls clothes which were made this way ‘horizontal’.

So when Cato the Elder said that tunics for slaves should be 3 1/2 feet long (de agri cultura 59), a common way of making those tunics would have been to set up a warp-weighted loom 7 feet wide, weave a rectangle of fabric about 3 feet long with a slit for the head, take it off the loom, turn it 90 degrees, and sew it up the sides. Another common way would have been to set up a loom 3 1/2 feet wide, weave two rectangles of fabric about 3 feet long, take them off the loom, rotate them 90 degrees, and either pin them at the shoulders or sew them at the shoulders. The authors of the gospel according to John (John 19:23-24) were thinking of the first kind of tunic when they said that the guards at the crucifixion diced for Christ’s tunic because it was woven in a single piece and could not be divided into four shares without tearing it.

So Saltman 4’s tunic was made like the early tunics from Christian Roman Egypt. It was woven as a single piece of fabric shaped roughly like a plus sign, then taken off the loom and sewn up the sides and under the arm, like tunic (1) from Akhmin, Egypt above.

Some of the tunics of the Sasanid period at Chehrābād seem to be made in the geometric tradition of rectangles and triangles cut from a long piece of fabric and sewed together. But this tradition, which we see in China, the Eurasian steppes, and ‘Germanic’ Europe, has not yet been documented in the Achaemenid empire. (There is one cut and sewed tunic from Tutankhamun’s tomb, but that is also cut simply). So when you interpret the clothes in Achaemenid reliefs and Athenian vase paintings, you should start from the assumption that it was woven to shape, and only try cut and sewed clothes if you cannot do that and match the art. The technology of the Achaemenid empire and Archaic Greece is very different from our technology, and if we want to solve problems the same way they did, we have to understand their approach.

Keep my loom clicking back and forth with a modest donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay

Further Reading:

• Veronika Gervers, “Medieval Garments in the Mediterranean World.” In N.B. Harte and K.G. Ponting (eds.), Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe. Pasold Studies in Textile History 2 (London: Heinemann, 1983) pp. 298-315
• G. M. Crowfoot and N. de G. Davies, “The Tunic of Tut’ankhamūn.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 27 (December 1941), pp. 113-130 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3854566
• Giannis Kadoglou “Reconstructing the Greek chiton,” Hoplologia I (2019) (link)
• “Textiles,” Reenacting the Archaic and the Long Sixth Century (link)
• Textile Cultures of Archaic Italy and Greece (2018)
• S.I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia, ch. 5 pp. 83-85 https://archive.org/details/frozentombsofsib00rude/page/82/mode/2up
• Polos’mak, N.V., Barkova, L.L., Костюм и текстиль пазырыкцев Алтая (IV-III вв. до н.З.) / Kostium i tekstil’ pazyryktsev Altaya (IV-III vv. do n. e.) / Pazyryk Altai Costume and Textiles (4th-3rd centuries BCE). Infolio: Novosibirsk 2005 (in Russian) pages 80-85 ISBN 5-89590-051-8 {colour photographs and diagrams of all the clothing and shoes from the Altai including trousers from Alakha-1 and the Verkh-Kal’djin-2}
• Graham Sumner, Roman Military Dress {good overview of men’s clothing in the earlier Roman empire}

Contact Dr. Karina Grömer through https://www.nhm-wien.ac.at/en/karina_groemer or https://nhm-wien.academia.edu/KarinaGroemer The Wikipedia page for Salzmumien von Zandschan links to many free web resources including a documentary.

Edit 2022-02-10: rephrased my description of an alternative way of making Cato the Elder’s tunics

(written 2021, scheduled 4 February 2022)