The Bluffer’s Guide to Ancient Clothing

This is part of a series of brief guides to the ancient world, a chance for me to revise and show off my expensive education at the same time! I’ll start with some shorter reference pieces, later in the series I’ll move onto wider themes in art, archaeology and all that jazz. These guides will be very informal, so to all you classics and history students out there, don’t even think about plagiarising them, they’ll be no use to you as they won’t be in formal essay-style prose. Enjoy!

Ancient Egypt

Egyptian clothing was largely made from linen, far more suitable for the hot climate than heavy wool. Silk was used occasionally, there have been traces found in some of the tombs. Animal skins, especially leopard skins, were worn sometimes over linen garments by priests and pharaohs, so we assume it had some special symbolism to it. Feathers were also used sometimes to adorn ceremonial headgear, like the atef crown worn by the god Osiris. What’s our evidence for Egyptian clothing? Well most of it comes from art, especially tomb paintings, reliefs and statuary, but some of the garments themselves have survived, thanks to the hot, dry conditions in some tombs.

The Garments

We don’t know for sure what the Egyptians called their clothes, but Herodotus (the famous historian and spinner of tall tales from Halicarnassas) refers to their tunics “kalasiris”. Men generally wore loincloths or kilts, which varied in length and style depending on the period of history (Egypt has a long and complex history, but the art and fashions changed very little over thousands of years) and the age of the wearer. Sometimes, a long thin kilt would be worn over a shorter one, a fashion particularly popular in the New Kingdom. Women tended to wear sheath dresses in the Old and Middle Kingdom periods, but it’s not very likely these were quite as tight as they look in the paintings, else the poor girls wouldn’t be able to move! Artistic representations of people were highly idealised, so an extremely tight dress was a good way to show off a woman’s shapely figure. In the New Kingdom, long, pleated, lightweight garments came into vogue, which seem to be one big piece of material knotted under the bust. Shoes are rarely shown in paintings, but those that survive are either flip-flop style sandals or slippers, usually made of reeds or similarly thick materials.