Have I mentioned before that I live at 30dN latitude?  Same latitude as Cairo, Egypt?  And that the sun is HOT?

Those who saw my lobster-red back at fighter practice from a walk to the store know that we get rather an intense sunlight here.  No wonder Le Corbusier was entranced with the light on the Greek boxes built into the hillsides – and Santorini is at 36dN.  That’s like…Chattanooga, Tennesse.

Anyway, Maudey told the Costume Guild after Pennsic that the book to get was Clothing Culture:Dress in Egypt in the First Millennium AD.   Amazon US doesn’t have it, though it is available from  Amazon UK.  However, I didn’t want to ship a book halfway around the world, a book on a place and time that I wasn’t sure I was that interested in, even based on Maudey’s recc, so I interlibrary-loaned it.

From our piddly little library!  And it’s mine for the next month.  It’s FABULOUS.  Check out the photography:

The captions tell you what the piece is, who’s had it for the last hundred or so years, how the piece was made, what sort of weave it is, its composite fibers…I don’t see how it could be better, frankly.

The text carries footnotes throughout, which I love, because then you know where assertions come from.  The catalog also discusses how these pieces came to Manchester, via W.M. Flinders Petrie.

Exhumed from cemeteries in Akhmim starting in 1884, a town in Upper Egypt, 140 miles north of Thebes, known in antiquity as Panopolis, the textiles came from "hundreds of coffins, still intact in the dry soil, containing mummied corpses; and the extraordinary fact (was) that these mummies had evidently been interred in the dresses they wore in life, literally decked out in their best clothes, and these clothes in many cases were preserved in a most wonderful manner.  All at once a vast and varied treasure of antique textile art was revealed in these tattered robes."

Frequently a graphic shows the complete layout of an incomplete garment, such as a child’s t-tunic, or a woven-to-shape hooded cloak.  So helpful for understanding the garment construction!

There’s maps, timelines for comparing with British events.  Discussions of spinning techniques, multi-heddle looms, and socio-economic production.  Apprenticeship is explained.  Religion and life expectancy.

Decorative darning and piecing.  Garments with embroidered ‘inscriptions’ in Greek letters.  The fineness of the threads!  "35/21 threads per cm" in one linen tunic (I think that’s weft/warp = horiz/vert).  Lots of children’s clothes.

"Studies of surviving textiles and garments from the Roman world show that clothing was dominated by a tradition of weaving to shape."  Holy cow.

I think I’m going to be learning a lot with this one, too.