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Prehistoric · Middle East & North Africa · Before 3000 BCE
The Middle East produced some of the world's earliest known textiles, as Neolithic communities turned flax and other plant fibers into cloth and developed the fundamental technologies of spinning and weaving.
By Dan Schnau · Last updated
Plant fibers form an important part of the prehistoric Middle Eastern textile record. Wild flax fibers from Georgia are more than 30,000 years old.11 At Nahal Hemar, linen yarn and non-loom-made fabrics have published calibrated dates around 8000 BCE.14,2 In the Copper Age, a man buried in a Judean Desert cave was wrapped in a large linen shroud, with a fringed kilt and a sash inside it.2 In the southern Levant, the textile evidence described by Shamir remains linen into the early Bronze Age, with wool textiles appearing later.2
This survey draws on the following kinds of evidence:
Fibers and tools show that cloth was made, not what garments looked like. Textiles rarely survive in Mesopotamia, so much of the story rests on a few unusually dry or burnt sites.2
Before the development of weaving, Middle Eastern populations, like people everywhere, relied on animal hides and furs for protection from the elements. Stone hide-working tools, notably scrapers for preparing skins, go back far into the Pleistocene across Eurasia, and bone awls, the hide-piercing tools that preceded the eyed needle, are documented in the region from about 40,000 years ago at Yafteh Cave in Iran and 34,000 years ago at Hayonim Cave in Israel.9 Beads from Üçağızlı Cave in Turkey, about 41,000 years old, carry wear suggesting they may have been sewn onto clothing.9
Plant fibers were in use just as early. In Dzudzuana Cave in the Republic of Georgia, researchers found microscopic flax fibers more than 34,000 years old.11 The flax was wild, gathered near the cave rather than farmed. Some fibers were twisted into cords, and some had been dyed.11 The excavators suggest the fibers could have been used to sew hides into clothing and shoes, or to make cords and packs.11 The wider story of these early fibers is told on the page about when clothes were invented, and the clothing of the cold north is covered in Ice Age clothing.
Fiber fragments from Ohalo II, a hunter-gatherer site in Israel occupied about 23,000 years ago,10 show that the manipulation of fibers into useful forms stretches back well into the Upper Paleolithic.7
After the last Ice Age, the Natufians of the eastern Mediterranean became the first people there to live in permanent villages year-round, while still hunting and foraging.13 Their burials contain elaborate jewelry of bone, shell, and stone, which marked the social standing of the dead. Shells from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were made into jewelry and headdresses.13
The cave of Nahal Hemar in the Judean Desert preserves linen yarn and non-loom-made fabrics, with calibrated radiocarbon dates around 8000 BCE.14 Shamir describes looping and knotted netting, rather than loom weaving.2 Older textile histories describe a ceremonial netted headdress and quote a date around 6500 BCE; that chronology should be distinguished from the calibrated dates in the later scientific table.15,14 Shamir also discusses plain-weave impressions from Jarmo in northern Iraq, dated in that review to about 7000 BCE.2 Flax (Linum usitatissimum) was one of the early cultivated plants discussed in the history of linen production.2
Carved stone gives a rare glimpse of what was worn. At Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia, hunter-gatherers of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (10th–9th millennia BCE) raised T-shaped limestone pillars up to 5.5 meters tall.12 Some pillars are abstract human figures, and they carry low reliefs of clothing, such as belts and loincloths.12
At Çatalhöyük, the remarkable Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia whose main mound was occupied from roughly 7400 to 6200 BCE, archaeologists have found carbonized fragments of plain-woven fabric, many of them used to wrap the dead.3,6 The cloth was long assumed to be linen, but microscope analysis published in 2021 showed it was made from the bast fibers of local oak trees.4,5 Despite older claims, the excavations of 1993–2017 found no loom weights or spindle whorls in the site's Neolithic levels.3 Wall paintings at Çatalhöyük depict figures wearing what appear to be animal skins and possibly woven garments, suggesting that both materials coexisted in this transitional period between hunter-gatherer and fully agricultural lifestyles.8,3
For a broader comparison, see the oldest surviving clothes and fibers.
Flax was a principal source of both oil and fiber in the ancient world, and it is probably the earliest domesticated plant used for textiles.2 Domestication mattered: experiments in Israel showed that wild flax stems were too heavily textured to make thread fit for cloth.2 Linen threads were already present in the southern Levant about 10,000 years ago, found attached to a comb in the Murabba'at caves.2
Early linen thread was often made by splicing: strips of flax fiber were overlapped and twisted together between thumb and finger, held by the plant's own natural glue.2 Splicing is possible without a spindle but hard without rotation, and a suspended spindle, weighted with a whorl, was used in the southern Levant from the Neolithic onward.2 Hundreds of spindle whorls were found at Chalcolithic settlements in the Beersheba Valley, where flax grown in the Jordan Valley was spun.2
The first loom known in the southern Levant appeared in the Chalcolithic period and was a horizontal ground loom.2 Wooden beams from one were found in the Cave of the Treasure.2 A cylinder seal from Susa in Iran, of the fourth millennium BCE, shows a ground loom, weavers, and the preparation of a warp.2 There is no evidence for loom weights in Israel until the Middle Bronze Age, when the warp-weighted loom replaced the ground loom there.2
The Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, of the southern Levant (about 4700/4500–3700/3600 BCE) has left an abundance of early cloth.2 About 400 natural caves in the Judean Desert served for living, burial, and refuge, and the two most important for textiles are the Cave of the Treasure and the Cave of the Warrior.2
The Cave of the Treasure, in Nahal Mishmar, held a hoard of 432 copper, ivory, and stone objects wrapped in a mat, along with textiles, loom parts, basketry, ropes, shuttles, and stone spindle whorls.2
The Cave of the Warrior, near Jericho, held a single burial from the fourth millennium BCE: a man aged about 45 to 50, wrapped in a linen shroud and lying on a plaited reed mat.2 The shroud is a single sheet 7 meters long and 2 meters wide, painted or smeared with black asphalt bands and finished with fringes; Shamir calls it the largest Chalcolithic textile discovered so far.2 Inside it lay a kilt with a fringe of tassels 54 centimeters long, and a sash.2 Buried with a bow, arrows, sandals, and a walking stick, he was probably a pastoral nomad.2
Nahal Ze'elim produced a small bag of white and blue steatite beads strung on linen threads and leather thongs.2 Most Chalcolithic textiles from the region are undyed, from off-white to cream and beige, because linen does not absorb dye easily. Some were bleached in the sun, and one has weft threads in shades of brown and red, the red probably from ochre.2
The spread of agriculture through the Fertile Crescent during the eighth and seventh millennia BCE brought with it the systematic cultivation of flax and the development of increasingly sophisticated spinning and weaving technologies.1 Sheep were domesticated in the Near East around 8000 BCE, but for meat. Their coats were mostly kemp, coarse bristly hair that cannot be spun, over a short undercoat of fine wool.1 Breeding sheep with usable wool appears to have taken about 4,000 years.1 In the southern Levant, wool was not yet a favored fiber in the Chalcolithic, and every fabric found in Israel from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age is linen; wool textiles appear there first at Jericho in the Middle Bronze Age.2
By the time of the earliest Mesopotamian cities in the fourth millennium BCE, the region's weavers were producing textiles from both linen and wool, the latter made possible by the selective breeding of sheep for their fleece rather than their meat.1,2 Unlike flax, the wool of even one sheep comes in several shades, which weavers could sort to make patterns.1 A tall stone vase from Uruk, made around 3000 BCE, shows naked workers bringing in the harvest while a fully clothed goddess or priestess receives offerings: clothing had begun to mark social rank.1 Once woolly sheep were available, they spread quickly, carried from the Middle East to Europe and the Eurasian grasslands.1
The story continues on the ancient Middle East page, with Sumerian fleece skirts and the wool industries of the first states.
The evidence rarely separates men's from women's clothing, but a few finds do. At the Natufian village of Eynan (Ain Mallaha), a headdress made from hundreds of tusk-shaped dentalium shells was found in a woman's burial.13 The Cave of the Warrior preserves a man's burial outfit: a linen shroud, a kilt with a long tasseled fringe, a sash, and sandals.2 On the Uruk vase, naked workers bring in the harvest, while a finely dressed elite presents food to a fully clothed goddess or priestess.1 The human figures carved on the Göbekli Tepe pillars wear belts and loincloths, though the UNESCO description does not say whether they are men or women.12
Myth: early people wore only animal skins. Wild flax fibers from Dzudzuana are more than 30,000 years old, and some were twisted or colored.11 Nahal Hemar preserves linen yarn and non-loom-made fabrics with calibrated dates around 8000 BCE.14,2
Myth: sheep were domesticated for wool. Early domestic sheep had coarse, kempy coats that could not be spun, and they were kept for meat. Wool cloth came thousands of years later.1,2
Myth: prehistoric cloth was plain and crude. Most Chalcolithic linen was undyed, but its quality was generally high and weaving faults are rare. The Cave of the Warrior textiles have fringes, tassels, decorated edges, and painted bands.2
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