Ancient Roman Textiles: In Past Societies and in Modern Museum Collections

This project concerns textile in and from ancient Roman society.

It consists of two sub projects of which the first focuses on how textiles and dress in particular are represented and presented in ancient literary and visual sources.

Everyone in Roman society used clothes and the clothed body was the social norm, and a means of visually communicating the status of the wearer. Clothes were used every day, from ordinary life to public ceremonies.

Very little remains of a once extensive textile production and one must turn to other sources for complementary information.

Project 1 will result in a publication where ancient literary and visual sources on Roman dress will be systematically presented, critically annotated and contextualised in order that its value for the understanding of dress be optimised. Project 2 deals collections of ancient textiles in modern museums.

The textiles stem mainly from Egypt where the dry climate of the desert have preserved them better than elsewhere in the Roman Empire. Some collections are the result of purchases by visitors in Egypt around 1900, and later sold to museums. Often they are not part of current exhibitions and thus, form a hidden cultural heritage.

Based on a couple of previous workshops, project 2 is the preparation of a publication where a group of international researches and scholars present a selection of textile collections, their history and cutting-edge research on ancient textiles in modern museums in a unique publication.