A Note on Ancient Fashions

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A Note on Ancient FashionsFour Early Egyptian Dresses in the

Museum of Fine Arts Bostonby ELIZABETH RIEFSTAHL

with the assistance of SUZANNE E. CHAPMAN

From the evidence provided by the monuments culpture in the round, reliefs, andpaintings t wo uld seem that the entire history of Egyptian dress might easily bewritten, but that evidence, abundant as i t i s and meticulously faithful to detail as i tseems to be, does not tell the whole story. Most of the works of art which havesurvived to ou r time come from tombs and they often pic ture Egyptians in the festiveapparel they aspired to wear in eternity rather than in their usual dress. Moreover,the garments that have apparently been so faithfully represented by the ancient artistsdo not always lend themselves to exact interpretation; we are frequently at a loss todetermine exactly how they were cut or adjusted to the body of the wearer.

As m ight be expected from the perishable nature of the materials from whichclothes were made, very few actual garments have survived from the elaborate trous-seaux well-to-do Egyptians took to their graves for use in the future life. Whiletattered fragments of what once was clothing have been found in burials from thePredynastic Period onward, complete garments are rare indeed, and most of thosewhich have survived can be dated to the late Eighteenth Dynasty, roughly after1300 B.C. It i s accordingly somewhat of a surprise to fi nd in the Museum of Fine Arts,Boston, four elaborately pleated dresses with long sleeves (Fig. 1 of a type earlierthan any complete garments hitherto found in Egypt and nowhere represented inancient art.

These dresses come from an excavation conducted in 1902-1903 by George A.Reisner at a cemetery of Naga-ed-Der in M iddle Egypt, about a hundred miles southof Cairo. The results of this excavation have never been fully published, and therecords are unfortunately incomplete, but they clearly indicate that the Bostondresses came from Tomb N 94, which contained the body of an unnamed womanwh o was provided wi th twelve such dresses, in one of which she was clothed, as wellas with a quantity of household linen, al l packed neatly into her rough woodencoffin . The exact date of her burial i s difficul t to determine, but it must have occurredduring the First Intermediate Period, in the half century or so between the end ofDynasty 6 and the rise of Dynasty 11, let us say in round figures in the neighborhoodof 2150 B. C.

It seems obvious from a casual examination of Egyptian sculpture and paintingthat most Egyptian clothing was draped, no t tailored. That is, it consisted of pieces ofcloth which were adjusted t o the body without cutting to make them conform to the44


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1 One o f four pleated dresses in the M useum o f Fine Arts, Boston. 34 56 245


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2 Old Kingdom shift with attached shoulder straps. After relief, Dynasty 5, in Museum of FineArts, Boston. 58.327.3 Diagram of draped dress of Ne w Kingdom. After B. Bruyere, Rapport sur les fouill sde Deirel Medineh, 1937).figure and with a minimum of sewing or none at all. For example a narrow shift wornby women in the Old Kingdom and persisting in art almost to the end of ancientEgyptian history was a rectangle with a single seam (or perhaps simply a wrap-around), reaching from breast to ankle and supported by attached shoulder straps(Fig. 2). A more ample womans dress, often pleated in vertical pleats, which appearsin the New Kingdom, seems to have been a draped rectangle requiring n o sewingwhatever (Figs. 3-4). A mans kilt, universally worn by rich and poor, i s also basicallya rectangle folded around the loins and held in place by ties or a girdle (Fig. 5); andcloaks worn by bo th men and women were most frequently rectangular shawlsthrown around the shoulders.

Probably some of the pieces of linen foun d i n burials from quite early periodsonwards were actually used for draped garments, but there i s rarely any way ofdistinguishing them as such, and excavators quite understandab ly usually list themas sheets or lump them together as household linen.

In contrast to the simp le draped garments most frequently worn, the dresses at theMuseum of Fine Arts represent an early attempt at tailoring. They are rather clumsygarments made of closely and evenly woven linen of varying fineness but on the46


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4 Dol l i n dress draped according to the diagram in Figure 3.5 Fragmentary slate triad of Mycerinus showing pleated kilt, Dynasty 4. Harvard UniversityMuseum of Fine Arts Egyptian Expedition. 77.3747.

who le fa ir ly co ar se . Each consists of three separate pieces , two of them used to forma yoke with long s leeves and t he thi rd, a s tra ight skir t wi th a seam up o ne s ide Fig.6).The two pa r ts of t he yoke , each pe rhaps shaped on t he loom and not by cu t t ing , a reat tached to the skir t a t or jus t below the breas t l i ne with ra ther coarse s t i tching inheavy l inen t h read in such a manner a s to form a dee p V, f ron t and back , for the headto pass th rough. This V i s f r inged at on e s ide, and each s leeve has a fr inged fin o n t h eo u t s i d e of i t s s ingle , underarm seam. The skir t shows a neat ly rol led hem and i tssingle seam is finished on the ins ide by a fr inge and a selvage. I t was obvious lypleated horizontal ly af ter having been fo lded in four , wi th th e resul t that i t seems atfirst glance to consists of f o u r separate panels , in which the pleats are a l ternatelyturned upwards and downw ards . The two pa r ts forming yoke a nd s l eeves a re a l sopleated horizontal ly across the bod y, b ut th e pleats make a ra ther awkward t rans it ionto the ve rt ica l a t t he sho ulde r and be come wider and more i r regula r as they approachthe wr i s t , where the opening is so narrow as to admit the passage of only a ra thersmal l hand.

All f o u r dresses are except ional ly well preserved; and they are ident ical in style,the only varia t ion they s how being a s l ight di fference in s i ze . Perhaps thei r s tyle is 247


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6 Diagram of pleated dresses in Museu m of Fine Ar ts , Boston.

no t as surpris ingly n ew a s i t seem s to b e a t f i rs t glance, for th e dresses a re bas ical lyth e famil iar shi f t, wi th t he shou lder s t raps develope d into a yok e with long s leeves .Th e resul t is not a part icularly happ y on e. I t wou ld se em that th e horizontal pleat ingw o u l d n o t o n l y b e b o u n d t o s a g f r o m t h e w e ig h t of t h e l i n en b u t w o u l d m a k e t h egarment s t ry ing for any f igure . Frankly, the d resses are c lumsy a nd very ugly, bu t they,l ike the sh i ft f rom which they a re de r ived , might have been t ransmuted in to grace bythe idea li z ing touch of t he anc ien t a r ti st i h e h a d e v e r b o th e r e d t o r e p re s en t t h e m o nthe s l im a nd youthfu l bodies h e loved to p i c ture.

Tha t p l ea t ing was used f rom th e Third Dynasty onward is ve ry ev ident f rom th etes t imony of t he m onument s . Dur ing the Old Kingdom, however , it s eems to havebeen conf ined a lmos t en t i rely to th e k il ts worn by k ings and nobles, which werepartially or entirely pleated in vertical orvery rarely horizontal) pleats and so met im esin pleats of a com plicate d herr in gbo ne pat tern Fig. 7).O n l y t w o or three representa-t ions of wom en in p l ea t ed dres ses a re known f rom th e Old Kingdom, and in thesethe p lea t s a re ve r t i ca l . In t he Middle K ingdom, the pe r iod immedia te ly fol lowing48


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that in which the Boston dresses were made, pleated clothing for women seems tohave been equally rare. I have come across only two examples: a sculpture in theCairo Museum showing a woman in a shift wi th vertical pleats arranged in groups offour, and a small ivo ry torso in the Louvre representing a woman in an identical gar-me nt . That pleating was probably extensively practiced in the M idd le Kingdom i sindicated, however, by fragments of pleated stuff found in tombs of Dynasties 11and 12 .

How was the ancient pleating produced and how was it made so permanent thati t has endured to the present day? The pleats in the cloth that has survived are soregular and in some cases so fine and so complicated as to ind icate that a mechanicalmeans must have been employed to produce them. As was long ago suggested byErman and more recently by Elisabeth Sta ehe lin it i s possible that some such deviceas the enigmatic corruga ted wooden board preserved in the Archaeological Museumat Florence may have served as a substitute for a gauffering iron, although the use ofso simple an instrument by no means solves the problem of the intricate pattern-pleating sometimes produced. Whatever the instrument employed a fixative musthave been used to give the pleats their permanency. Miss Staehelin has suggested agelatinous substance similar to that used at the present day for the sizing of fabricsand believes that the use of such a substance may possibly account for the yellowtint sometimes employed by Egyptian artists in picturing pleated portions of kilts. A

7 Kem-Nefert in kil t wit h herringbone pleating. Afterrel ief in Museu mofFine Arts,Boston.04.1761.

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sizing may also be responsible for the very even darkening of the dresses in theMuseum of Fine Arts, wh ich are of a deep and fairly uniform bro wn in color; b ut onthe other hand, as many pieces of ancient linen testify, such darkening of the fabricmay be merely an accident of age.

Although the Naga-ed-Der cemetery in which the dresses were found has remainedlargely unpublished and the garments from Tomb N 94 in the Museum of Fine Artshave aroused little interest, they have not entirely escaped notice. In 1935 the lateWilliam Stevenson Smith illustrated and briefly discussed one of them in an article,The O ld Kingdom Linen List, and I illustrated another in a monograph publishedin 19 44 . In the latter publication indicated in passing that the Boston tunics wereno t unique. Now, to be more specific, an poin t to an identical garment in theLouvre, the only salvageable one of several (the number unspecified) found in 1903at Asyut in an anonymous burial of Dynasty 9-10, and to another, assigned toDynasty 11 and now in Cairo JE 43684) , which comes from excavations of Said BeyKashaba at Mei r in 1912, and was described by Spiegelberg in 1927. even dresses ofidentical style but unpleated were discovered in 1897 by Petrie at Deshasheh in awomans bur ial 148b) which he dated to Dynasty 5, bu t which was subsequently andmore plausibly dated by Borchardt to Dynasty 6 or l a t e r . W hile the coffin and thebody it contained went to the Cairo Museum, o not know the present location ofthe dresses, if indeed they cou ld be preserved.

Like the Boston dresses, those from Deshasheh, as illustrated in a line drawing inthe Petrie publication, consist of a yoke in two separate parts, each w ith a long sleeve,and an attached skirt, but they are of extraordinary length, measuring five feet ormore from shoulder to hem and thus implying a wearer of some six feet in height.Since the average female Egyptian was l itt le over five feet tall, a six-foot womanwould indeed have been a monstrosity. Dr. Smith, i n his article on the linen listsmentioned above, very sensibly suggested that the Deshasheh dresses were destinedto be pleated. Although the three parts of the Boston garments must certainly havebeen pleated before they were assembled, and it is difficult to see how the pleatingcould have been done afterward, it seems possible that Petries over-long dressesmay have been hastily stitched up at the time of the womans burial, to await pleatingin a better world.

Borchardt, in his description of the coffin and body from burial 148 b at Deshasheh,notes that the body i s clothed in a finely pleated fabric and supports his statementwi th an excellent photograph. Petrie unaccountably failed t o notice this or, if he did,failed to record it in his report. He did record, however, another Deshasheh burial(117) which contained much clothing rotted dark brown and almost too tender tolift. This included a mass of kilted s tuf f w ith another piece of k ilted stuff on thebody, and thus might we ll have suggested to him some explanation for the excessivelength of the unpleated dresses he found so puzzling.

Petrie, noting that garments similar to those he had found in Tomb 148 b werenowhere depicted on the monuments, took them to be evidence of a time lag,stating that the monumental dress must already have become obsolete by Dynasty50


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figure and the battle-axe previously noted to be of the type usually ascribed to theFirst Intermediate Period. Petries Tomb 117 at Deshasheh, which contained thatmass of kil ted stuff, also included beads and amulets which could well have beenmade in the First Intermediate Period.

Since al l the dresses were found in uninscribed and undecorated tombs and whatseem to be relatively humble burials, it i s impossible to determine the social statusof their wearers. I t must be remembered that the First Intermediate Period was a timeof social chaos. As the Ol d Kingdom tottered to its fall, Egypt was torn by civil warsin which petty claimants struggled for the throne. The country was ravaged byplundering soldiers, fields were left unsown, crops unharvested, and hungry mobsjoined the troops in looting and angry destruction. Foreigners from east and westtook advantage of the chaotic situation to penetrate the Delta, and Nubian tribesharassed the southern borders. While a few of the governors of Middle Egypt man-aged to ma intain a degree of order with in the lim ited bounds of their own provinces,most Egyptians lived their brief lives in the uncertainty of civil war and revolution.

An often quoted record of this period was made by a sage named Ipuwer, who i sthought by some scholars to have been an eyewitness of the events he describes. Ichoose at random a few sentences from his long and repetitious (and perhaps some-what exaggerated) la m en t.

The plunderer i s everywhere. Gates, columns, and walls are consumed by fire.Grain has perished on every side. No craftsmen work. The poor have become richand the possessor of property has become nothing. Squalor i s throughout the land.There are none whose clothes are white in these times. They that were in the PurePlace [the cemetery] are cast out upon the ground. Many dead men are buried inthe river.

Saddest of all, lpuwer records that laughter has perished.His pessimistic picture i s to a considerable extent supported by archaeological

evidence. Wh ile there have survived a number of large and richly decorated tombsin the oases o f peace maintained by provinc ial governors, and the paintings i n suchtombs frequently show a freshness of inven tion and a new vigor of execution, muchof the art of the period i s crude and unskilled, a nostalgic repetition of forms andmotifs established in the happier days of ordered government. The greater numberof known tombs are of careless construction and the burials in them often giveevidence of haste. None of the coffins in which were found the pleated dresses orfragments of what were presumably such dresses was identif ied by the name or rankof the owner, so there i s no way o f telli ng whether the garments were worn by ladiesof the old aristocracy or of the new rich or merely by middle-class women apingsome otherwise unrecorded fashion of a provincial court.

That the horizontally pleated dresses failed to enter the repertory of the ancientartist may be because thei r vogue was so brief or so limited, possibly never spreadingbeyond the confines of Middle Egypt, even, perhaps, because they proved to beimpractical and aesthetically unappealing. Nevertheless, the garments deserve aplace in the history of dress, not merely as the earliest complete articles of clothing52


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8 D i a g r a m of a typ ical ba g - tun ic .9 P tah - K enuw i w i th his w i f e , w h o w e a r s a V - n e c k e d s h i f t, D y n a st y 5. Harvard Univers i tyM u s e u m of Fine Arts Egyptian Expedit ion. 06.7876.

known to have survived from the pas t bu t a lso nd this seems his torically mo reimportant s present ing the f i rs t recorded example of t h e s le ev e. W e d o n o t m e e twith the long s leeve again unt i l la te in Dynasty 18, and th en i t appea rs in differentf o r m a s a n a p p e n d a g e of the bag-tunic .

The bag-tunic , as i t s name impl ies , i s s imply an inverted bag formed by a longrec tangle which is fo lded over and s t it ched u p th e s ides , w i th an o pening l e f t a t t het o p of each s ide for t h e a r m s a n d a n o t h e r c u t a t or near the fo ld for t he head to pas sthrough Fig. 8 . The tunic may vary in l ength f rom knee to ankle and i t is madesuff ic iently wi de t o b e eas ily pu t on or taken off. Thus it covers the upper a rms ; bu ti t inevi tably fa l ls into ra ther c lumsy folds under the armpits and i i t is not held ina t t h e wa i s t by a s ash or girdle, it is bou nd to sag a t t he s eams .

O n e of the s imples t of al l garments , the bag-tunic has been at home in manycount r i e s and a t many t imes . So has a tunic , probably derived from i t , that has co met o b e k n o w n as t h e da lma t ic . The da lma t i c is shape d by s imple cu t t ing to form a 253


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dress with kimono sleeves, thus eliminating much of the underarm fullness of thebag-tunic. Whil e I known of no evidence, pictorial or other, for the use of the bag-tunic in Egypt prior to the Middle Kingdom, what might possibly be a dalmaticappears on a stela of a woman named Sehenefner wh o l ived in Dynasty2 r. Smiththought that the row of garments pictured on this stela might be ancestors of theBoston pleated dresses, but the representation i s so schematic as to make both hisand my guess equally hazardous.

The earliest bag-tunic I know of is an actual garment of the late Eleventh Dynastypreserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art . There also, and scattered in a numberof other museums, are bag-tunics found in tombs of the New Kingdom. While Icannot pre tend to have examined all the evidence offered by the monuments, I havefound no certain representation of either the bag-tunic or the dalmatic prior to thelatter period. It i s possible that a womans dress origina ting in the Ol d Kingdom andserving as alternate to the shift with shoulder straps is basically a bag-tunic. It seemsusually to have been made in one piece with the neck cut into a deep V and thearms and the tips of the shoulders left bare, but it is difficult to judge from therepresentations just how it was fashioned (Fig. 9 . The ancient artists picture it asform-fitting and very narrow o narrow as to have made movement practicallyimpossible unless the dress had been provided with deep slits at the sides. Reisnerfound part of such a garment in a Giza burial, but it was only a roughly cut dummy

he front half of a shift laid over a womans body and giving no clue as to whatthe complete garment may have b e e n .

In Dynasty 1 8 and later, the bag-tunic appears very frequently in Egyptian art, bu tsince painters and sculptors often avoided picturing its inevitable bagginess, thegarment i s no t always easily recognizable. As w orn by men, i t s invariably shown incombination with a kilt or a wide kiltlike sash, usually pleated, which is wound tightaround the buttocks, and doubled over in front like an Ascot tie. To judge from themonuments, the bag-tunic was always made of fine linen, sheer and clinging, bu t iti s evident f rom surviving examples that such tunics were often made of heavy, close-woven, and consequently bulky weaves. As for the dalmatic, I know of no actualgarment of this type prior to the Coptic Period, from which time its line can betraced down to the present, when it survives chiefly in ecclesiastical vestments.Nevertheless guess at its use in the New Kingdom on the basis of representations ofshirts with wide, elbow-length sleeves bordered with bands of horizontal pleating.I do not see how such a border could have been produced along the arm-slits of abag-tunic unless the pleating had been extended down the sides of the garment,and for this the ancient artists provide no evidence.

One of the relatively few unmistakable representations of women dressed in bag-tunics comes from the tomb of Mose (N254 ) at Th eb es . Here, the underarm foldsare clearly shown on voluminous, long garments wor n by two women carrying,respectively, a basket and a jar (Fig. 10 . These garments are fitted at the arm-slitswith long, pleated sleeves. Two harvesters in the same scene wear very tight dresseswi th similar sleeves, and believe that they and also the f lax gatherer i n the Theban54


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10 Wom en i n bag-tunics wit h long, pleated sleeves. Drawing of scene i n the Theban tomb ofMose. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

11. Harvester in long-sleeved bag-tunic. After painting in the t omb of Nekh t at Thebes.

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tomb of Nakht (No. 52 , who appears in a comparably tight dress with long sleeves(Fig. 11 , are also clad in bag-tunics, although in these examples, as in a number ofothers, the ancient artist could no t resist moldin g the dresses to the slender forms ofthe wearers. Since there i s no evidence for the use of the button or the hook-and-eye(or, needless to say, the zipper ) in ancient Egypt, it i s difficult to see how the girlscould have put on their working clothes, which w ould at best have been impracticalfor agricultural labor anywhere save perhaps in the fields of the blessed dead.Actually, save for their extreme tightness, which I believe to have been a fantasy ofthe artist, the pictured dresses cou ld have been n o more unsuitable than those whichEgyptian peasant women trail through the dust of today.

That the bag-tunic was not merely a current dress for men and women of theNew Kingdom b ut was also a part of royal regalia seems clear from a number of suchgarments foun d in the tomb of T ut an kh am un . These tunics, elaborately patterned inrichly colored tapestry weave, enhanced by embroidery, and in some cases decoratedwi th glitte ring bracteates or beadwork, were, to judge from their sumptuousnessand the frequently symbolic nature of their ornament, in tended for ceremonial use,perhaps in connection with the kings coronation, and preserved for the recurrentanniversaries of that occasion, which Tutankhamun, dead so young, could hope tocelebrate only in a future life. The royal tunics varied from knee- to ankle-lengthand were, as was customary, wide enough to have covered the upper arm. At leastone of them was provided wit h long, close-f itting pleated sleeves made of plain linenwhich was somewhat finer than that of the tunic itself.

There i s some ground for believ ing that in the New Kingdom the sleeve (and per-haps also the patterned tapestry weave) came into Egypt from the East. While theEgyptians were never as isolated from the great ancient civilizations of western Asiaas we have sometimes been led to believe, with the eastward expansion of empireduring the New Kingdom oriental influence became increasingly apparent in allaspects of Egyptian social life. I t seeped into language and literature; it fil tered intoreligion; i t brought new methods and equipment to warfare; i t gave a freshness ofinspiration, new motifs, and more than a hint of naturalism to art; and it showeditself in an extravagance of manners and of dress undreamed of in previous periods.

While an admittedly cursory examination of works of art from the Third Millen-nium in western Asia h a s yielded me no clear picture of the existence of the sleevein the dress of that region either before or during the years in which the Bostondresses were made, Egyptian paintings of the New Kingdom almost invariably showAsiatics in long-sleeved garments strikingly like the galab iyeh, the fitted dress withdolman sleeves which was almost universally worn by Egyptian and other men ofthe Near East until a few years past and which is still frequently met with today. It i spossible that the Egyptian painter, as was his custom, made the clothing of theEasterners more form-f itti ng than i t actually was and that what they wore was simplythe bag-tunic with attached long sleeves. Nevertheless, the Asiatics pictured inscenes of the Midd le Kingdom, a period closer in time to the dresses in the Museumof Fine Arts, wear no such sleeved garments but are usually clad in draped rectangles56


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fastened on one shoulder, which are exactly similar in everything save their brightgeometric patterns to those wor n b y many Egyptians from very early times onward.

Thus, until some new evidence is found, the Museum's sleeved dresses must beheld to belong to a small group unique in the history of dress, one that apparentlyhas neither ancestors nor direct descendants. Their chief claim to fame i s theirantiquity, for, as I have previously noted, they seem to be the earliest completeEgyptian garments known to have survived to our own time. Their brief vogue mayhave been due in part to the fact that they were impractical and unattractive.For us who live today they may serve as one of the less extreme examples of thefantastical and unbecoming clothing that has been inflicted on men and womenduring the lo ng history of changing fashions.NOTES1 I am greatly indebted t o the late Dr. Wil lia m Stevenson Smith, former Curator of the

Department of Egyptian Art of the Museumf Fine Arts, Boston and to Mr. Dows Dunham,Curator Emeritus of that department, for permitting me to examine the dresses here describedand for putting a t my disposal the records of the Naga-ed Der excavation from which theycome. While I must be held responsible for the t e x t of t his article, Miss Chapm an hascollaborated with me, not only by providing many of the illustrations but also by poi ntingout details of the constru ction o f the dresses, whic h m ight otherwise have escaped my notice.In fact, the entire department has come to my assistance: Miss Mary B. Cairns has patientlytyped and retyped my unt idy manuscr ipt; Mrs. Ruth Hodni ck has checked my references; andDr . E. L. B. Terrace, formerly Associate Curator, hunted in the archives of the Cairo Museum toprovide details about the excavation from which the Meir dress described by Spieglbergwas found.All of the drawings illust rating this article, with the exception of those in Figures 3 and 10 weremade b y Miss Chapman, who a l so dressed the doll illustrated in Figure 4. Figure 3 has beenreproduc ed fr om Bernard Bruyere, Rapport sur /e5 fouilles de Deirel Medineh (1934-1935),Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire, Fouilles, vol. 15, Cairo, 1937. Fig. 10,as statedin note 17, is from a drawing by Lindsley Hall now i n the Metrop olitan Museum of Art. Figure 11w a s drawn by Miss Chapman after the color plate in Mekhitarians Egyptian Painting (see note 18).

recent research has whit tle d it down to little more than a lifetime. See William C. Hayes"Chronolo gy" in Cambridge Ancient Histor y, rev. ed., 1962, voI. I, ch. 6, pp. 3-12.

3 The followin g thread counts were kindly made by M r s . Benjamin Markell and Mr. Larry Salmonof the Department of Textiles of the Museum of Fine Arts. No count could be made of thefourth dress 34.56) as it was on exhibition and difficult of access. The weave of a l l the garmentsis a tabby weave, over one, under one, and the warp was believed t o ru n up and down i n theseparate parts of the three dresses examined. Right and l eft are those of the viewer .

13 3966C1) back side of yoke

11/cme f t count7 / c mw e f t count19/cma r p count4 /cmw a r p count1 0 / c mwe f t count5 / c mw e f t count20/cmarp count6/cmarp count

3) center of left sleeve 3 right sleeve10/cm weft count6/cme f t count

23/cmw arp count 15/cmarp count 19/cmarp count4) yoke edge of skirt 4 skirt hem1 5 / c mweft count23/cm warp coun t

2 While some Egyptologists have formerly biven this period a span of two hundred years or over,

13 3966A 13 3966BI ear end of right sleeve 1 left sleeve

11/cmef t count17 /cmwarp count11/cmweft count14/cmarp count10 /cmweft count

2) right sleeve near shoulder 2 ) yoke back 2) right sleeve

3 left sleeve

9 / c mweft count16 /cmwarp count 257


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4. Measurements in centimeters are as follows:13 3966A 13 3966B 13 3966C 34 56

Length shoulder to hem 76 72 81 74Width of skirt 54 44 47 43Depth of yoke fro m shoulder 13 12 19 13Wid th o f yoke at shoulder from neck opening to wrist 54 43 49 42Circumference of wrist opening 16 11 13 12

5. Elisabeth Staehelin, Untersuchungen zu r agyptischen Tracht im Alten Reich, Munchner

6 For the Cairo statue, see H. G. Evers, Staat aus dem Stein, Munich, Bruckmann, 1929, vol. I pl.agypt ologische Studien, 8, Berlin, Hessling, 1966, p. 169.

51; fo r the ivory i n the Louvre, see Jacques Vandier, M anue l darcheologie egyptienne, vol. I l lParis, Picard, 1958, p. 253, pl. 89.2.A fragment of linen pleated in exactly the same fashion as that represented on these sculptureswas found by D e Morgan at Dashur; i t is reprodu ced in A. C. Mace and H. E. Winlock, The Tombof Senebtisi at Lisht, Metrop olitan Museum o f Art : Egyptian Expedition, vol. I, New York[The Gi llis Press], 1916, p. 42, no te 1.

E. Staehelin, pp. 14 ff.

Altertumskunde 71 (1935), pp. 134-149, esp. pp. 137-138 and fig. 1; also Elizabet h Riefstahl,Patterned Textiles in Pharaonic Egypt, Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, 1944, p. 8, fig. 7. Anotherdress from Tomb N 94, exactly similar to those n ow in Boston, i s in the Cairo Museum. It sillustrat ed in Vivi Laurent-Tackholm, Faraos blomster, Copenhagen, Natur og Kultur DanskForlag, 1952, p. 255. Photogr aphic evidence indicates that one or mo re additional tombs i n theburial ground of Naga-ed-Der may have also con tained pleated dresses similar t o those foundin Tomb N 94, b ut i n these cases the re cords are incomplet e.

Mem oire s de Ilns titu t Francais dArcheologie Orie nta le du Caire, vol. 24, Cairo, 1911, pp.162-164, pl . 33.

10 W. Spiegelberg, Altagyptische gefaltelt e (plissierte) Leinwandstoffe, Annales u service desantiquites de lEgypte 27 (1927), pp. 154-156, especially pt. A. Ein Totenhem d des Mitt ler enReiches, pp . 154-155, pl. 1.The dimensions o f this dress as given by Spiegelberg are length(apparently fr om shoulder) 103 cm.; wi dth , incl udin g sleeves, 128 cm.; w idt h at waist, 90 cm.I t s according ly larger than any of t he Boston dresses.

11. W. M. F. Petrie and F LI. Griffith, Deshasheh, London, Egyptian Exploration Fund, 1898, pp. 31-32,pl. 35, fig. 148; also L. Borchardt, Denkmaler des Alten Reiches im Museum von Kairo, nr.7295-7808, vol. II, Catalogue generale des antiquites egyptiennes du Musee du Caire, Cairo,1964, no. 1791. The l id o f the coffin in Tomb 148b bore a rudely incised hieroglyphic inscription,which i s unintellig ible to the philologists to whom I have shown it.

12 Hans Bonnet, D ie agyptische Tracht bis zum Ende des Neuen Reiches, Unter suchungen zurGeschichte und Altertumskunde Agyptens, V l l l , pt. 2, Leipzig, Hinric hs, 1977, p. 61.

13 Hans Bonnet, D ie Waffen d e r Volker des a l t e n Orients, Leipzig, Hinrichs, 1926, pp. 24-26,pl. 12h. Also W. Wo lf, Di e Bewaffnung des altagyptischen Heeres, Leipzig, Hinrichs, 1926,pp. 20 ff.

14. A translation o f Ipuwers lament has recently become available i n a paperback edition , with an

7 Adolf Erman, Life i n Ancient Egypt, trans. H. M. Tirard, London, Mac millan, 1894, p. 218; also

8 W. S. Smith, The O ld Kingd om Linen List, Zeit schrift u r agyptische Sprache und

9 Emile Chassinat and Charles Palanque, Une campagne de fouilles dans l a necropole dAssiout,

excellent introdu ction and notes by William Kelly Simpson: Adolf Erman, The AncientEgyptians A Source Book of their Writings, translated from the German by Aylward M.Blackman, N ew York, Harpe r & Row, Harpe r Torchbook s, 1966, pp. 92-108; see also pp. xxix-xxxof Professor Simpsons introduction.

15 J. E. Quib ell, Excavations at S aqqa r a 1912-1914), vol. VI, Archaic Mastabas, Cairo, Service desAntiquites de lEgypte, 1923, no. 2146 E. pls. 26-27. Plate 27 i s also discussed i n W. S. Smith,The Old Kingdom Linen List, p. 137.58


17/17

16 G. A. Reisner, A History of the Giza Necropolis, vol. I Cambridge, Harvard Un iversity Press,1942, p. 452, pl . 42.

17 Miss Nora E. Scott, Associate Curator of the Department of Egyptian Art, The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, has kindly drawn my attention t o this example of bag-tunics and has furnishedthe copy of a drawing made of the scene in the to mb o f Mose by Lindsley Hall, which i sreproduc ed i n Fig. 10 of this art icle. Photographic negatives of this scene are also preserved inthe Metropolitan Museum.

18. For a reproduction in color of the draw ing i n Fig. 11, see Arpag Mekhi tarian, Egyptian Painting,trans. S. Gilber t, Ne w York, Skira, 1954, p. 75.

19 Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tut -a nkh -A me n II, London, Cassell, 1933, pp. 124-125; also C. M.Crow foot and Norm an de Garis Davies, "The Tunic of Tut'ankhamun,' ' Journal of EgyptianArchaeo logy 27 (1941), pp. 113-130; and R. Pfister, "Les textiles du tomb eau de Toutankhamon,"Revue de lart ancien et moderne 11 1937), pp. 207-218.

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A Note on Ancient Fashions