Ancient Egyptian linen: from the Tarkhan Dress to royal linen

When we talk about Egyptian textiles today, we think of cotton. Yet the whole history of pharaonic Egypt belonged to linen. It clothed the living and wrapped the dead; it served as sailcloth, as bandages and even as a means of payment – and thanks to the dry climate an unusual amount of it has survived.

The world's oldest woven dress

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London holds the Tarkhan Dress. The Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated it in 1913 from a tomb in the cemetery at Tarkhan, about 50 km south of Cairo. In 2015 the University of Oxford's radiocarbon unit dated it to 3482–3102 BC, which makes it the oldest known woven garment.

The dress is made from three pieces of hand-woven linen. It has a V-neck, and both the sleeves and the bodice are pleated into fine, sharp folds. The hem is missing, so we do not know how long it was. Signs of wear show that someone wore it in life.

Spinning: splicing and twisting

Ancient Egyptian linen yarn was made by a technique researchers call splicing and twisting. The fibre was stripped from the stem in flat strips about a millimetre wide and around 80 cm long. Wider strips were split, the ends were joined into a continuous strand, and the strand was twisted into thread on a spindle. The spinners – usually girls and young women, according to the depictions – often worked with two spindles at once. A damp environment helped when spinning fine yarn.

Weaving: from the ground to the upright loom

The oldest depiction of a loom appears on a dish from Badari (around 3600 BC); others are known from the model workshop in the tomb of Meketre (early 12th Dynasty, around 1950 BC). Weaving was done on horizontal looms stretched out at ground level. In the New Kingdom vertical looms appear, for example in a depiction in the tomb of Thutnofer (18th Dynasty, around 1425 BC), and the weavers using them were apparently men.

Almost all ancient Egyptian linen is woven in 1/1 plain weave or a variant of it. Typically there are more warp threads than weft threads – the cloth is "warp-faced".

How fine was the linen?

Museum records make it possible to compare weaving density across the millennia:

Piece	Period	Threads per cm (warp × weft)
Neolithic fragment from the Fayum	around 5000 BC	≈ 12 × 9
Garment from Tarkhan	around 3000 BC	≈ 24 × 15
Wrapping from the mummy of Thutmose II	1492–1479 BC	≈ 38 × 35
"Very sheer linen cloth", the Met	around 1491–1473 BC	46 × 30

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York identifies the last piece as the highest grade, which the Egyptians called royal linen. It is woven from exceptionally fine yarn that must have been spun from flax harvested while still very young. The cloth was mended and washed in antiquity – in other words, it was used.

Tutankhamun's linen in Northern Ireland

Among the nearly 5,000 objects Howard Carter found in Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 was a great deal of fine linen. In 1923 Carter gave one sample to a buyer from a Belfast spinning mill. The family kept it until 2007, when it went to the Lisburn Museum in Northern Ireland – a town that itself grew up on linen.

What changed later

From the 3rd century AD plain linen was often decorated with tapestry-woven bands of linen and coloured wool; silk was added later. Even in the late Middle Ages Egypt was known for fine linen textiles. The cotton that now carries Egypt's name came to the fore only in the 19th century – you can read its story in Egyptian cotton.