Fashion in Ancient Mesopotamia: The History of the Clothes and Jewelry Worn by Different Mesopotamian Civilizations

Unfortunately, virtually no ancient Mesopotamian textiles survived because of the climate. Southern Mesopotamia is a floodplain with a high-water table, built of mud brick that dissolves back into mud, and organic materials rot there rather than desiccating as they do in Egypt. Thus, civilizations that manufactured cloth at an industrial scale for over 3,000 years only left mineralized fragments preserved by contact with metal, impressions in corrosion, a few charred pieces, and traces recovered by chemical analysis. The clothing that generations of Mesopotamians wove, wore, mended, and were buried in is gone. 

Thankfully, a lot of jewelry survived because it is made of metal and stone. The Royal Cemetery of Ur, excavated in the 1920s, produced gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and carnelian ornaments of such quality and quantity that they transformed the understanding of early Mesopotamian civilization overnight, and they remain the single richest body of physical adornment from the region.

Moreover, the most valuable information came from ancient words. Mesopotamia invented writing and then used it obsessively for administration, and the cuneiform records include textile accounts, ration lists, workshop rosters, merchants' letters, temple inventories, royal correspondence, and law codes that regulate what people wore.

Inevitably, as wealth and power amassed among some empires in Mesopotamia, more ostentatious attire and jewelry arrived, enhancing the strange tufted garment of the earliest periods with the fringed shawl and the legal power of a hem, dyes and colors, the embroidered magnificence of the Assyrians, hairstyles and beards, crowns and horns that marked a god, the jewelry of Ur, and the trade routes that supplied all of it. Fashion would also influence the world’s oldest surviving law about veiling, the clothing of divine statues, the equipment of soldiers, and the ultimate evolutions of ancient Mesopotamia’s last empires.