ancient clothing – Book and Sword

Cross-Post: Achaemenid Clothing, and Linen Armour

Historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones will give a talk on recreating Achaemenid clothing on Tuesday 5 December from 12.00 to 13.00 EST (UTC – 5.00). People can listen over Zoom here. In conjunction with the British Museum’s recent exhibition Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece, it was decided to attempt to create the types of garments worn... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Achaemenid Clothing, and Linen Armour

A Neo-Elamite Bitumen Relief

A bitumen relief of a woman sitting cross-leged on a stool in front of a tripod with a fish. A child in the background fans her — “The spinning woman.” Bitumen relief from Susa, c. 800-600 BCE. Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales, SB 2834 – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010176914 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU

We don’t have many pictures of clothed women from the middle of the first millennium BCE in the Near East. Most of the local peoples did not paint scenes of daily life on their pottery, and their stone-carvings show a man’s world or a heavenly world. The Assyrian palace reliefs show some queens and deported women, and one Achaemenid seal shows a wealthy woman seated on a throne. One other picture of a clothed woman is a Neo-Elamite bitumen relief in the Louvre. Its 9.3 cm high, so five times larger than most of the little seals.

Textile Cultures of Archaic Italy and Greece

Colour photos of a section of woolen textiles preserved as copper salts or ashes — A sample of weft-faced wool tabbies from Greece, 800 BCE-500 BCE. Note the 1 mm long red lines for scale. Photos by Margarita Gleba and Joanne Cutler published as Figure 10 in Margarita Gleba, “Tracing textile cultures of Italy and Greece in the early first millennium BC,” *Antiquity* 91 (2017) pp. 1205-1222 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.144

This week I had a chance to talk with Margarita Gleba about her work on Iron Age (1000-400 BCE) textiles from Spain, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria. Thousands of fragments are known, often preserved in the corrosion products on bronze grave goods such as vessels or broaches, but understanding them requires rare knowledge and expensive equipment for taking high-magnification photos, and the details are often scattered in publications which are hard to find and use different language to describe the same thing. A Cambridge History of Western Textiles had a brief section on this material which I would like to read, but publication was delayed for almost 20 years while the archaeology moved on, and until this week I did not know of any other overviews.

Most of the peoples from Britain to Afghanistan grew flax and tended sheep and used drop spindles, warp-weighted looms, and tablets to turn linen and wool into cloth, but they made different kinds of textiles in different regions. Textile technology was hard to change, because in recent cultures, girls started to learn to spin and weave as toddlers and spend much of their childhood mastering the skills (Susan M. Strawn, “Hand Spinning and Cotton in the Aztec Empire, as Revealed by the Codex Mendoza,” http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/420). It is very difficult to change a skill practised for so many years, or persuade adults to take lessons in a skill which children are supposed to master. Moreover, it was bound up with the local crops, climate, and taboos: the sheep in different areas produced wool which was good for different things, and there was a divide between cultures which wove textiles to shape and wrapped and pinned them into garments, and cultures which wove long rectangular pieces, cut them up, and sewed them into garments.

Trying Hard to Show it Wrong

See caption — Roman relief of a man wearing what scholars call an “Attic helmet” (style of first or second century CE, Palazzo Ducale, Mantova, inv. gen. 6733). Showing someone wearing one of these helmets associated them with Greek culture, but examples from this period are hard to find in the ground.

People, especially people who are most interested in material culture, often find it hard to accept that ancient art does not directly and literally depict the world. People who recreate Roman material culture, for example, often fret that when we can check it against other evidence, Trajan’s column is usually wrong. “But the rest of the sculpture is so lifelike,” they complain. “Shouldn’t we use what evidence we have?” “Why would they go to so much trouble to depict something wrong?”

Dress and Armament of the Persian Army

Dr. Stefan Bittner has kindly informed me that the line drawings from his thesis on the Achaemenid army are available at his online photo gallery. Copies of his thesis, and several other books, are still for sale at his press Bodem Verlag. His book is the single biggest source for Achaemenid kit and clothing, and... Continue reading: Dress and Armament of the Persian Army