The Clothing Makers

Clothing is rare in the archaeological world of the ancient Near East. Because the material is organic, it often deteriorates long before archaeologists can find them; but occasionally the right conditions align to preserve such material, as seen in the pictures on display. Otherwise, archaeologists must fill in their understanding of what ancient clothing looked like through the discovery of pictures, clothing accessories, and the items used to make clothing. The artifacts on display show examples from each of these categories. Picture #1 is a replica of an ancient Egyptian tomb painting that shows what the clothing (and hair) styles of the ancient Egyptians and West Semitic peoples (such as the ancient Canaanites and Israelites) looked like.  Some of the more common clothing accessories found are cloak pins, some of which are also known as toggle pins or fibulas. The ancient people made their clothing from a variety of materials, including wool, leather, and linen, spinning the yarn and weaving the fabrics themselves. The practice of dying cloth was not uncommon, though it could be painstaking (it would take about 119 pounds of murex shells (#14) to produce  1 gram of purple dye)!

Artifacts on Display:

Pictures on Display