An amazing piece of Egyptian clothing, made 5,000 years ago, is listed as the ‘oldest dress in the world’. The beautifully sewn and pleated dress gives us a taste of the intricacy and richness of the ancient society that produced it.
First discovered in 1913 by a British Egyptologist Mr William Matthew Flinders Petrie, The Tarkhan dress, owes its name to the Egyptian village where it was found, located 48 kilometers (30 miles) from Cairo. It has exquisite stitching that was only meant to be worn long after it was created.
Alice Stevensoncurator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology in London and author of a study on the age of the dress indicated that textiles recovered from archaeological sites are generally no more than 2,000 years old.
Few ancient garments, made from plant fibers or animal skins, have escaped decay. A limited number of garments of a similar age have survived to the present day, but these were generally fabrics simply wrapped around the body. Tarkhan’s dress, on the contrary, with its fitted sleeves, V-neckline and narrow pleats This is an old haute couture work.
Characteristics of the oldest dress in the world
The robe features a weave with 22-23 warps per centimeter and 13-14 embroidery threads per centimeter, resulting in a gray band on the warp, apparently for additional decoration.
The main part of the dress is made of a straight piece 76 centimeters wide. The original length of the dress cannot be determined because the hem is missing, but according to the aesthetics of the time and some tests it was subjected to, the dress was longer than what is seen Today.
The wrinkles at the elbows and armpits reveal that it was not just ceremonial wear, but that someone once wore the dress.
It is the oldest woven garment in the world, called the Tarkhan robe. Credit: Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology / University College London.
Study and dating of the Tarkhan dress
After spending five millennia in an Egyptian tomb, archaeologists sent the dress to the Petrie Museum in the early 20th century. But it got tangled up in a pile of dirty laundry and went unnoticed.
It wasn’t until 1977, when researchers at the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), sorting through a pile of ancient Egyptian textiles and preparing to clean them, discovered the remarkably well-preserved dress.
They saved the fabric, sewed it in a type of extra-fine sheer silk called Crepeline to stabilize it, and mounted it for display. The robe became known not only as the oldest garment in Egypt, but also as oldest woven garment in existence.
It is the oldest woven garment in the world, called the Tarkhan robe. Credit: Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology / University College London.
In the 1980s, using accelerator mass spectrometry, the dress was dated to the late 3rd millennium BC.
For the researchers, this date was too long, and they also doubted that the date of the linen was the same as the date of creation of the garment. So in 2015, the Oxford University Radiocarbon Facility examined a clothing sample, a small segment of the dress, using carbon-14. The findings indicated with 95% accuracy, that the Tarkhan robe dates to between 3482 and 3102 BC. vs., possibly even before the First Dynasty of Egypt (3111-2906 BCE)
Currently the dress is in the collection of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology at University College of London (UCL), with the code UC28614B.
Without a doubt, the Tarkhan dress is proof of the artisanal haute couture who could achieve an ancient society as prosperous as it was in ancient Egypt 5,000 years ago.
References: National Geographic.
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