The History of Clothing

Prehistoric · Middle East & North Africa · Before 3000 BCE

Prehistoric Middle Eastern Clothing

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.

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The Birth of Woven Textiles

Fragments of Neolithic fabrics, basketry, and cordage from Nahal Hemar Cave on display at the Israel Museum Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo: Gary Todd. Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

The Middle East holds a strong claim to being the birthplace of woven cloth. Some of the oldest surviving textile fragments — pieces of linen fabric dated to roughly 6500 BCE — were discovered in the Neolithic cave of Nahal Hemar in the Judean Desert; they were made by twining, knotting, and looping rather than on a loom. Impressions of plain-woven cloth on clay and bitumen from Jarmo in northern Iraq, dated to about 7000 BCE, suggest that loom weaving had begun by then. Even earlier, twisted plant-fiber cordage from Ohalo II, a camp on the Sea of Galilee about 19,000 years old, shows that the manipulation of fibers into useful forms stretches back well into the Upper Paleolithic. The critical innovation came with the domestication of flax (Linum usitatissimum), one of the earliest cultivated crops, which provided a reliable source of long, strong fibers suitable for spinning into thread and weaving into cloth.

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. 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. Despite older claims, no loom weights or spindle whorls have been found in the site's Neolithic levels. 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.

From Animal Skins to Woven Garments

Wall painting of a deer hunt from Çatalhöyük, with human figures around a large red deer Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. Photo: Zde. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Before the development of weaving, Middle Eastern populations — like people everywhere — relied on animal hides and furs for protection from the elements. Evidence of hide-working tools such as scrapers and bone awls appears at sites throughout the Fertile Crescent dating back tens of thousands of years. The transition to woven textiles was gradual; at many Neolithic sites, animal-skin garments and early woven fabrics appear side by side, each serving different purposes.

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. 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. This dual textile tradition of linen and wool, born in the prehistoric Middle East, would go on to dominate Western clothing for thousands of years.

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