Table Of ContentFashioned Selves
Dress and Identity in Antiquity
Edited by
Megan Cifarelli
Oxford & Philadelphia
Published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
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Front cover: BM 124876 Assurbanipal on horseback, dressed in a rosette-patterned hunting dress with
stylus inserted in the waistband. North Palace Room S, Panel 13 (© The Trustees of the
British Museum).
Back cover: Tribute procession of the Syrian delegation, with a Persian courtier leading a delegate by
the hand on the Eastern stairway of the Apadana, Persepolis (top); Tribute procession of
the Assyrian delegation, with delegates leading rams and carrying textiles on the Eastern
stairway of the Apadana, Persepolis (bottom) (courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago).
Contents
List of contributors �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������v
Introduction: Fashioned selves ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1
Megan Cifarelli
Part One: Funerary selves
1 Fashioned identity in the Şərur Valley, Azerbaijan: Kurgan CR8 ��������������������������11
Jennifer Swerida and Selin Nugent
2 To toggle back and forth: clothing pins and portable identities in the Old
Assyrian Period ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������27
Nancy Highcock
3 Male dress habits in Roman period Palmyra ������������������������������������������������������������41
Maura Heyn and Rubina Raja
Part Two: Sacred fashions
4 Dressed to heal, protect and rule: vestiges of shamanic praxis in
ancient Near Eastern rituals and beliefs��������������������������������������������������������������������57
Diana L. Stein
5 A proposal for interpreting the role of colour symbolism in Prepalatial
Cretan body adornment� �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������75
Cynthia S. Colburn
6 Biblical regulation of tattooing in the light of ancient Near Eastern
practices ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������89
Nili S. Fox
7 Weapons and weaving instruments as symbols of gender in the Ancient
Near East �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������105
Sophus Helle
iv Contents
8 Israelite high priestly apparel: embodying an identity between human
and divine ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������117
Christine Palmer
Part Three: Communal selves
9 A feather in your cap: symbols of “Philistine” warrior status? ���������������������������131
Josephine A. Verduci
10 Some observations on fringe in Elamite dress �������������������������������������������������������147
Trudy S. Kawami
11 The impenetrable body: armour and the male nude in Greek art ����������������������161
Marina Haworth
12 Dressed to dazzle, dressed to kill: staging Assurbanipal in the royal
lion hunt reliefs from Nineveh ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������175
Omar N’Shea
13 Banqueting, dress, and the idealized Sogdian merchant ��������������������������������������185
Betty Hensellek
Part Four: Beyond identity
14 A sense of stone and clay: the inter-corporeal disposition of
Minoan glyptic �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������203
Emily S. K. Anderson
15 The phenomenology and sensory experience of dress in Mesopotamia: the
embodiment of discomfort and pain through dress ���������������������������������������������219
Allison K. Thomason
16 The tangible self: embodiment, agency, and the functions of adornment in
Achaemenid Persia ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������233
Neville McFerrin
List of contributors
Emily S. K. Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Johns
Hopkins University. Her research and fieldwork primarily concern the material and
visual cultures of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age with a focus on
the ways in which objects are involved in the relations, negotiations, and unfolding
of sociocultural life�
Megan Cifarelli is Professor of Visual Studies and Art History at Manhattanville College,
and a Consulting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Her research
focuses on applications of dress, gender, and archaeological theory to the visual and
material cultures of the ancient Near East, particularly during the 1st millennium BCE.
Cynthia S� Colburn is Professor of Art History at Pepperdine University� Her research
focuses on the art and archaeology of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean, including
identity construction through bodily adornment and performance.
Nili S. Fox is Professor of Bible and Director of the Archaeology Center, Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. Her current research focuses on dress
practices in ancient Israel and neighboring cultures�
Marina Haworth teaches Art History at North Hennepin Community College near
Minneapolis, Minnesota. She specializes in Greek art, with a specific interest in
symposium pottery.
Sophus Helle is a PhD student in Comparative Literature and Assyriology at the
University of Aarhus, Denmark. He has published on a number of topics relating
to authorship, epic poetry, and the representation of gender in cuneiform cultures.
Betty Hensellek’s research interests revolve around the material culture of Central
Asia and Iran in the 1st millennium CE. She is the Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam
Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of the
History of Art, Cornell University.
vi List of contributors
Maura Keane Heyn is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focuses on the funerary portraiture of
Palmyra, in particular the hand gestures, depictions of women, and the significance
of the different styles of dress worn by the deceased.
Nancy Highcock is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. In addition to her work on the
material culture of Mesopotamia, she is the director of the lower town excavations
at the site of Kınık Höyük-Niğde in south-central Anatolia.
Trudy S. Kawami received her PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia
University, where she focused on the art of ancient Western Asia. Living in Brooklyn,
NY, she has a special interest in ancient Iran and the many manifestations of its rich
visual traditions�
Neville McFerrin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and
World Religions at Ohio University. She specializes in dress theory with a particular
focus on the interactions between adornment, sense modalities, perception, and
materiality on the sites of Persepolis and Pompeii.
Omar N’Shea is Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta. His research interests
span the visual and textual cultures of the ancient Near East in general, and Iraq in
particular. In his work, Omar has addressed the methodological issues that arise in
the study of masculinities in Mesopotamia.
Selin E. Nugent is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind
at the University of Oxford and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the
Ancient World at New York University. Her research centres on nomadic pastoralism,
human migration, and group cohesion in the South Caucasus, which she explores in
her doctoral thesis, “Pastoral Mobility and the Formation of Complex Settlement in
the Middle Bronze Age Şərur Valley, Azerbaijan”.
Christine Palmer is a faculty member at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary where
she teaches courses on the Hebrew Bible and leads archaeological study trips to Israel,
Jordan, and her own native country of Greece. Her research focuses on ritual at the
intersection of text, material culture, and embodied experience.
Rubina Raja is Professor of Classical Archaeology and centre director of the Centre
for Urban Network Evolutions. She also directs the Palmyra Portrait Project, which
she initiated in 2012. Raja’s fields of interest cover iconography, numismatics, and
urban development in the Mediterranean and the East from the Hellenistic into the
Medieval periods�
List of contributors vii
Diana L. Stein lectures in the Department of Classics, History, and Archaeology at
Birkbeck, University of London. An Alexander von Humboldt scholar, she has authored,
co-authored, and edited publications on aspects of ancient Near Eastern material
culture, including seal use and design, Bronze Age chronology, and ritual practice.
Jennifer Swerida is the Assistant Director of the Naxçivan Archaeological Project
(Naxçivan, Azerbaijan), Co-Director of the Bat Archaeological Project (Sultanate of
Oman), and is the Dyson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Museum, University of
Pennsylvania. Her research interests centre on identity formation and alternative
forms of social complexity in the Ancient Near East.
Allison K. Thomason is a Professor of Ancient History at Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville. She specializes in the material culture of the ancient Near East.
Josephine A. Verduci specializes in the personal adornment of the Aegean and the Near
East and is author of Metal Jewellery of the Southern Levant and its Western Neighbours:
Cross-Cultural Influences in the Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean. She is currently
an Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne and a Research Fellow of the
Australian Institute of Archaeology�
Introduction: Fashioned selves
Megan Cifarelli
This volume gathers papers presented in the Approaches to Dress and the Body sessions
at the Annual Meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 2016 and
2017, as well as in sessions relating to ancient dress at the Annual Meetings of the
Archaeological Institute of America in 2018.1 The case studies in this volume draw
upon varied and overlapping corpora of evidence, including archaeological bodies
themselves and the physical traces of dress in the form of markings on the skin and
associated mortuary goods, as well as evidence for dress in written and visual culture.
The materials stem from a range of geographic and chronological contexts – including
Late Antique Central Asia, the prehistoric Caucasus, Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria, the
Levant, Egypt, the Aegean, and the Greco-Roman world. The breadth of this volume
is deliberate, intentionally underscoring the cultural specificity and localization of
the reciprocal interactions between dress and identity. The chapters emphasize as
well that dress does not simply function as a static expression of identity or status
– inscribed on the body to be “read” by others – but is a dynamic component in the
construction, embodiment, performance, and transformation of identities.2
A brief look at the origins of dress in human history – its relationship to the evolution
of human cognition and the development of behavioural modernity – sheds new light
on the proverbial statement that “clothes make the man” (attributed to Erasmus of
Rotterdam, among others). Direct evidence for the initial development of dress is
lost to time and the perishability of materials. Indirect evidence, however, suggests
that our distant ancestors were decorating and covering their bodies as early as the
early Late Pleistocene (Bar-Yosef Mayer and Bosch 2019). Caches of coloured pigments
accompanying sites of human activity in this period, for example, may have been used
to mark bodies (Barham 2002; Langley and O’Connor 2019). Three sites claim to have the