Oldest Known Dress Made More Than 5000 Years Ago
Two new world firsts have just been identified: the oldest known dress and the oldest known bar and restaurant in France.
The first known dress, as well as the earliest known bar and restaurant in France, were identified this week.
The
discoveries, reported in the journal Antiquity, provide a glimpse of
what early life was like in both ancient Egypt and southern France
thousands of years ago.
The garment, which dates to around 3482 B.C., is known as the “Tarkhan Dress,”
and now looks like a tattered and stained shirt. When new, however, the
linen dress would have looked fashionable even today, as researchers
determined it featured a natural pale grey stripe with knife-pleated
sleeves and bodice. Its hem is missing, so the original length of the
dress is unknown.
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“The
survival of highly perishable textiles in the archaeological record is
exceptional, the survival of complete, or almost complete, articles of
clothing like the Tarkhan Dress is even more remarkable,” Alice
Stevenson, curator of the University College London (UCL) Petrie Museum
of Egyptian Archaeology, said in a press release.
“We’ve
always suspected that the dress dated from the First Dynasty, but
haven’t been able to confirm this as the sample previously needed for
testing would have caused too much damage to the dress,” she added.
Now
that the dress’ age has been confirmed, it has been named Egypt’s
oldest garment and is the oldest known surviving woven garment in the
world.
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To
calculate its age, Michael Dee of the University of Oxford and
colleagues measured a small sample of the dress to determine how much
radiocarbon (a radioactive isotope of carbon) remained in the linen.
Linen is especially suitable for radiocarbon dating, according to the
researchers, because it is composed of flax fibers that grow over a
relatively short time.
The dress, currently on display at the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology,
features wear and tear that date back to its earliest days. The
researchers believe that a young teenager or a very slim woman wore it.
A
separate study in the same journal reports the discovery of a tavern in
southern France. The remains of the structure are 2141 years old and
are located at a site called Lattara.
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“Not
only is the tavern the earliest of its kind in the region, it also
serves as an invaluable indicator of the changing social and economic
infrastructure of the settlement and its inhabitants following the Roman
conquest of Mediterranean Gaul in the late second century B.C.,” wrote
co-authors Benjamin Luley of Gettysburg College and Gaël Piquès of
Montpellier University.
At first the researchers thought that
they had found a bakery, since they determined that the site once
featured three huge ovens and indoor gristmills. They later, however,
found that another nearby room, across from a courtyard, had benches
lining its walls.
Bones from fish, sheep and cattle were also
unearthed, as were the remains of big platters and bowls. The meat was
probably cooked BBQ-style over a charcoal-burning hearth, which was also
found at the site.
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Most
prevalent, however, were shards from ceramic drinking vessels. Since
the tavern dates to France’s Roman period, the researchers believe that
this was a typical — albeit very well equipped — Roman-style tavern with what must have had an extensive menu on offer. Such roadhouses were common along well-traveled routes.
Wine
was the drink of choice in the region, then and now, and plenty of it
appears to have been served at the tavern, which would have been quite a
popular spot in the scenic area circa 125 B.C.
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