The History of Clothing

Prehistoric · South Asia · Before 3000 BCE

Prehistoric South Asian Clothing

The Indus Valley civilization pioneered cotton cultivation and weaving, giving the world one of its most important textile fibers thousands of years before the Common Era.

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Cotton and the Indus Valley Civilization

Steatite "Priest-King" bust from Mohenjo-daro wearing a trefoil-patterned cloak draped over the left shoulder "Priest-King" sculpture, Mohenjo-daro, National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi. Photo: Mamoon Mengal. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 1.0.

South Asia's greatest contribution to the global history of clothing is cotton. The earliest known cultivation of cotton (Gossypium arboreum) for textile use has been traced to the Indus Valley civilization, with fragments of cotton cloth discovered at the site of Mohenjo-daro dating to the third millennium BCE. However, evidence from the earlier site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan suggests that cotton fibers were being used as early as the sixth millennium BCE — the earliest known cotton in the Old World. Cotton was also domesticated independently in the Americas, whose upland species dominates world production today, but South Asia was one of the fiber's original homes.

The Indus Valley cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa reveal a civilization deeply engaged in textile production. Numerous spindle whorls and fragments of woven cotton cloth have been recovered from these sites, and the surviving samples are generally taken as evidence of well-developed spinning techniques. Stone sculptures from Mohenjo-daro show men in draped garments — a long shawl drawn over the left shoulder — while terracotta figurines depict women wearing little more than a girdle or band about the loins beneath elaborate fan-shaped headdresses, indicating that clothing served decorative and possibly ritual functions alongside practical ones.

Early Weaving and Dye Traditions

Terracotta female figurine from a Mature Harappan site, with a fan-shaped headdress, side ornaments, and layered necklaces Female figurine, terracotta, c. 2700–2000 BCE, National Museum, New Delhi. Photo: Ismoon. Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Before the rise of the Indus cities — and, in other regions, for long afterward — South Asia's Neolithic and Chalcolithic communities relied on a combination of animal hides, plant fibers, and bark for body covering. Sites in the Deccan Plateau and the Ganges Plain, many of them contemporary with or later than the Indus cities, are reported to have yielded evidence of early weaving in the form of textile impressions on pottery and collections of spindle whorls. The development of settled agriculture in these regions provided both the raw materials — cotton and other plant fibers — and the stable conditions necessary for textile craft specialization.

The Indus Valley people also appear to have been early practitioners of textile dyeing. Traces of madder (a red dye derived from the Rubia plant) were reported on cotton fragments from Mohenjo-daro, an early example of dyed cotton cloth — though that identification, made with the analytical techniques of the excavation era, may not be reliable, and dyed fibers older still are known elsewhere, including dyed cotton microfibers from Tel Tsaf in the Jordan Valley dating to about 5200–4700 BCE. The presence of standardized weights and measures across Indus cities suggests that textiles may have been produced not only for local use but also for trade — a hypothesis consistent with cotton fibers of probable South Asian origin turning up far to the west, at Tel Tsaf in the Levant, though surviving Indus cloth itself has not been securely identified in Mesopotamia. South Asia's prehistoric textile traditions thus laid the groundwork for the subcontinent's long history as a center of cotton production and trade.

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