Dressing for the Ages
By JARRETT A. LOBELL
Monday, April 11, 2016
The Tarkhan Dress likely was worn by a young or slim female member of the royal court, and then placed in the tomb as a funerary object. Although the bottom does not survive, it may once have been full-length.
Over the two-plus years Alice Stevenson has been curator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London, she has looked at the delicate cream-colored garment hundreds of times, wondering at both the fineness of its workmanship and its extraordinary age. Thought to date from nearly 5,000 years ago, the “Tarkhan Dress” was once part of a large pile of dirty linen cloth excavated by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1913 at the site he named Tarkhan after a nearby village 30 miles from Cairo. In 1977, researchers from the Victoria and Albert Museum, while sorting through the pile of textiles as they prepared to clean them, discovered the dress, remarkably well preserved. They conserved the fabric, sewed it onto a type of extra-fine, transparent silk called Crepeline to stabilize it, and mounted it for display. The dress came to be known not only as Egypt’s oldest garment, but also as the oldest woven garment in existence. Yet in the absence of a precise original archaeological context—the mudbrick tomb in which the linen had been found had been plundered in antiquity—the exact age of the dress remained a subject of contention.
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/215-1605/trenches/4349-trenches-egypt-predynastic-period-tarkhan-dress
