15 February 2016
The Tarkhan Dress, a V-neck linen shirt currently on displayin the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, has been confirmed as theworld's oldest woven garment with radiocarbon testing dating the garment to thelate fourth-millennium BC.
Radiocarbon testing conducted in 2015 by the University ofOxford's radiocarbon unit, and published this week on Antiquity's ProjectGallery, has established that the dress was made between 3482-3102 BC with 95%accuracy.
Although the dress was thought to be Egypt's oldest garment,and the oldest surviving woven garment in the world, the precise age of thedress was uncertain as previous carbon dating proved too broad to behistorically meaningful. The new results both confirm the dress's antiquity andalso suggest that it may be older than previously thought, pre-dating the FirstDynasty.
The team from the University of Oxford, led by Dr MichaelDee, measured a 2.24mg sample of the dress to determine how much radiocarbon, aradioactiveisotopeof carbon, remained in the linen. From this theywere able to provide an indicative date for when the linen was woven. Linen,from which the Tarkhan Dress is made, is especially suitable for radiocarbondating as it is composed of flax fibres that grow over a relatively short time.
Dr Alice Stevenson, Curator at the UCL Petrie Museum ofEgyptian Archaeology, said:
"The survival of highly perishable textiles in the archaeologicalrecord is exceptional, the survival of complete, or almost complete, articlesof clothing like the Tarkhan Dress is even more remarkable. We've alwayssuspected that the dress dated from the First Dynasty but haven't been able toconfirm this as the sample previously needed for testing would have caused toomuch damage to the dress.
Although the result is a little less precise than is nowroutinely possible through radiocarbon dating, as the sample was so small, it'sclear that the linen for the dress was made at the cusp of the First Dynasty oreven earlier."
Originally excavated by Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in 1913from a First Dynasty tomb at Tarkhan, an Egyptian cemetery located 50km southof Cairo, the dress lay undiscovered with various other textiles until 1977when the bundle was sent to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London forconservation work.
The dress itself is made from three pieces of sturdyhand-woven linen with a natural pale grey stripe with knife-pleated sleeves andbodice. The hem is missing so it's not possible to know the precise length ofthe dress, but the dimensions indicate that it fitted a young teenager or aslim woman. Although the exact context of its use remain unclear, there arevisible signs of wear indicating that it was worn in life.
The Tarkhan Dress is on display at the UCL Petrie Museum of EgyptianArchaeology.
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Image
- The Tarkhan Dress (Courtesy of UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology)
