Garments in the Pharaonic world

Garments in the Pharaonic world

Clothing materials

    The Egyptian climate with its hot summers and mild winters favored light clothing made from plant fibers, predominantly linen and in Roman times occasionally cotton, an import from India Wool was used to a lesser extent, and seldom by Egyptians proper.

Small amounts of silk were traded to the eastern Mediterranean possibly as early as the second half of the second millennium BCE and traces of silk have been found in Egyptian tombs.

Animal skins, above all leopard skins, were sometimes worn by priests and by pharaohs in their role as first servants of the god. Such outfits were found in Tutankhamen's tomb and were depicted quite frequently on the walls of tombs. At times kings and queens wore decorative ceremonial clothing adorned with feathers.

Production

The manufacture of clothes was apparently mostly women's work. It was generally done at home, but there were workshops run by noblemen or other men of means.

The most important textile was linen. It was produced from flax, the quality ranging from the finest woven linen, the byssus for royalty, to the coarse cloth peasants wore. People who were buried in mastabas or pyramids would not be satisfied with anything less than the best quality linen, jdm.j, after death as well.

Pepi I had a vision that his ka would ...be taken to this heaven... to the noble ones of the god, to those whom the god loves, who lean on their Dam-sceptres, the guardians of Upper Egypt, who clothe themselves with jdm.jt-linen, who live on figs, who drink of the wine, who anoint themselves with the best oil... and if a person was lucky he would be ...given as a boon of the king: royal linen, a garment, //////////, aAt-linen, fine and good [linen], /////// [without] end

Articles of dress

They wear tunics made of linen with fringes hanging about the legs, called "calasiris", and loose white woolen cloaks over these.

Ornaments used with dresses

Tutankhamen's tomb yielded many pieces of clothing: tunics, shirts, kilts, aprons and sashes, socks, head-dresses, caps, scarves, gauntlets and gloves, some of them with fine linen linings, others with separate index and middle fingers and a hole for the thumb. Underwear in the form of a triangular loincloth was also found.

If royals had a garment for every body part and for any occasion–even though statues and reliefs often show them wearing only a SnD.wt, the so-called kilt, and a crown–most of their subjects had to make do with much less. Clothes were expensive and in the hot Egyptian climate people often wore as little as possible. If we are to believe the depictions, at parties servants and slave girls wore little more than skimpy panties and jewelry though one may assume that the reason for this undress was not a lack of funds. Working women mostly dressed in a short kind of kalasiris. Men doing physical labor wore a loin-cloth, wide galabiyeh - like robes or, if they were working in the water, nothing at all. Children usually ran around nude during the summer months, and wore wraps and cloaks in winter when temperatures might fall below 10°C.

The gods had to be dressed as well. This was the duty of a small number of priests allowed to enter the holiest of holies, where the god's statue was. Nesuhor, commander of the fortress at Elephantine under Apries, took care that the temple of Khnum had all the servants necessary to serve the needs of the god:

I appointed weavers, maidservants and launderers for the august wardrobe of the great god and his divine ennead.

  

Fashion

The clothes were generally made of linen and kept simple: a short loincloth resembling a kilt for men, a dress with straps for women. These basic garments with minor variations accounting for fashion, social status and wealth did not change fundamentally throughout Egypt's history.

Fancy Dress & Ornaments

Very little sewing was done. The cloth was wrapped round the body and held in place by a belt. Its colour was generally whitish, in contrast to the colorful clothes foreigners wore in Egyptian depictions, although dyed cloth was not unknown.

Everyday clothing was mostly undecorated, though pleating was known since the Old Kingdom, when some dresses of upper class Egyptians were pleated horizontally. In the New Kingdom the pleats were often vertical, but pleating could be quite intricate. A Middle Kingdom piece of clothing displays three different types of pleating: one part is pleated with pleats a few centimeters apart, another with very narrow pleats and a third part is chevron-patterned, with horizontal and vertical pleats crossing each other. How the pleating was done is not known, but it is generally supposed to have been very labor intensive.

The length of the kilts varied, being short during the Old Kingdom and reaching the calf in the Middle Kingdom, when it was often supplemented with a sleeveless shirt or a long robe.

Herodotus called the robes worn by both sexes in Egypt kalasiris. Material and cut varied over the centuries, though the cloth of choice was always linen.

The kalasiris women wore might cover one or both shoulders or be worn with shoulder straps. While the top could reach anywhere from below the breast up to the neck, the bottom hem generally touched the calves or even the ankles. Some had short others were sleeveless. The fit might be very tight or quite loose. They were often worn with a belt, which held together the folds of cloth. 

They were sewn from a rectangular piece of cloth twice the desired garment length. An opening for the head was cut at the centre of the cloth, which was then folded in half. The lower parts of the sides were stitched together leaving openings for the arms.

Women's dresses were at times ornamented with beads. They covered the breasts most of the time, though there were periods when fashion left them bare.

Circular capes date back as far as the Old Kingdom. They were generally made of linen and had an opening for the head cut at the centre. They were often dyed, painted or otherwise decorated and covered little more than the shoulders. Shawls were sometimes worn during the New Kingdom.

The ancient Egyptians knew how to use starch. They used it to stick sheets of papyrus together. According to Pliny they made starch by mixing some of the finest wheaten flour with boiling water. They also soaked linen bandages in starch, which became hard and stiff when dried. It would be tempting to assume that they achieved the pleats in their clothes by using starch, but there is no evidence for that.

  

Laundering

They wear linen garments, which they are especially careful to have always fresh washed.

Cleanliness was apparently next to godliness in ancient Egypt. And who was closer to the gods than the pharaohs themselves. Since earliest historic times the titles of "chief washer of the palace" and "washer to the pharaoh" are known, and keeping the royal clothes lily white was the duty of the "chief bleacher."

Men and women wore perfumed cone on the tops of their heads.
The cone was usually made of ox tallow and myrrh and
as time passed melted and released a pleasant scent.

Manually washing clothes was hard work. Soap was unknown to the ancient Egyptians, so lye, made of castor oil and saltpetre or some such substances, or detergents made of soapwort or asphodel were used. The laundry was beaten, rinsed and wrung by pairs of workers. By 1200 BCE there were fireproof boilers in the washhouses, and the hot water lightened the workload. 

Many, above all the poorer people had no access to facilities and had to do their laundry under at times difficult conditions. Washing on the shore of the river or the bank of a canal, which had the advantage of not having to carry a lot of water in heavy earthen pots, but could sometime be dangerous:

The washer man launders at the riverbank in the vicinity of the crocodile. I shall go away, father, from the flowing water, said his son and his daughter, to a more satisfactory profession, one more distinguished than any other profession.

In the eyes of Kheti at least, washing women's clothing was not really work a man should be doing. He says disparagingly of the washer man:

He cleans the clothes of a woman in menstruation.

Mending

Before the advent of industrial production techniques, cheap overseas transportation and a Third World population with little choice but to work for peanuts, clothes made up a considerable part of one's living expenses. Even though the clothes of the Egyptians were lighter than those of Europeans and less critical to survival, they were careful not to ruin them, and when a garment got torn, it was probably the ancient Egyptian housewife who got her favorite needle out of her needle box, a knife and a piece of thread and settled down to mend it. Garments have been found which were mended a number of times and finally recycled and turned into something else.

Headdresses

If depictions are anything to go by, then ordinary Egyptians did not wear any headdress as a rule, similar to African peoples further south. The better off would put on wigs - perhaps just on special occasions. These grew to a remarkable size during the New Kingdom.

The pharaohs are always represented wearing crowns, but whether this is a pictorial convention or whether they did so in every day life cannot be verified.

Footwear

People living around the Mediterranean had little need for elaborate footwear, with exceptions like the Hittites in their Anatolian highlands who wore shoes with turned up toes, though in Egyptian reliefs Hittites are depicted unshod. The Egyptians went barefoot much of the time, but wore sandals on special occasions or when their feet were likely to get hurt. The sandals were tied with two thongs and, if they had a pointed tip this were often turned upwards. They were made of leather or rush woven or stitched together, and often had leather soles and straps.

The cheapest kind of sandals was affordable to all but the very poorest. Ipuwer in his Admonitions used the lack of sandals to describe the destitute that, in the topsy-turvy world of chaos he warned from, attained great wealth: He who could not afford sandals owns riches.

The kings wore at times very elaborately decorated sandals, and sometimes decorative gloves as well, but generally they were depicted barefoot, as were the gods.

Sandals made of gold have been found which cannot have been very comfortable to their wearers if they were worn at all. Among Tutankhamen's equipment there were 93 pieces of footwear. There were sandals made of wood with depictions of enemies on their soles, on which the king would tread with every step and another pair, which was fastened with buttons.

One of the changes in daily life, which occurred during the Middle and New Kingdoms, was the increasing use of sandals, above all where soldiers or travelers’ were concerned. In the story of The Two Brothers Anpu set out on a journey:

Then he took his staff and his sandals, as well as his clothes and his weapons, and he started to journey to the Valley of the Pine.

Sandals seem to have had an importance that mostly escapes us nowadays, symbolizing prosperity and authority. Thutmose III speaks of the countries he conquered, and possibly of the rest of the world as well, as all lands were under my sandals.

Among the oldest images of the dynastic period are depictions of the sandal-bearer of the pharaoh, and for the sixth dynasty official Weni this post was seemingly an important stage in a splendid career, mentioned twice in his autobiography.

Sandals were very closely and beautifully stitched up of rush, and usually soled with leather. A small bundle of rush was wound round by a rush thread, which at every turn pierced through the edge of a previous bundle. Thus these successive bundles were bound together edge to edge, and a flat surface built up. This was edged round in the same way. In basket making exactly the same principle was followed, with great neatness. The rush sandals soled with leather, leather sandals alone, and leather shoes, were all used. The shoes seem to have been just originating at that period; two or three examples are known, but all of them have the leather sandal strap between the toes, and joining to the sides of the heel, to retain the sole on the foot ; the upper leather being stitched on merely as a covering without its being intended to hold the shoe on the foot. These soles are compound, of three or four thicknesses.

Early Middle Kingdom shoes were little more than sandals with straps between the toes and joined to the sides at the heel with the upper leather just covering the foot without being fastened to the foot itself. During the New Kingdom there were times when some Egyptians seem to have taken to occasionally wearing shoes, as in a depiction of Queen Nutmose at Karnak. This may have come about as an influence of the Hittites, with whom they came into contact at this time.

More information about Pharaonic life on:

 http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/index.html