Time of Textiles in Ancient Greece

Marie-Louise Bech Nosch

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9783112223758
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

Textiles accompany us throughout our lives, au fil du temps, from the cradle to the grave. Aspects of time, seasons and chronology play an important role when exploring textiles and clothes in antiquity. The time of textiles appears highly gendered, embodied, tangible, and concrete.  Textiles follow their own timeframes and paces, and they connect us to the past in an intimate and diachronic way because we still wear woven fabrics, as people did in antiquity.

Textiles themselves are ephemeral and rarely survive in archaeological contexts. But when they do, they can show evidence of a long life.

This book is about the time of textiles in ancient Greece: how time was articulated and conceived via clothing and textile production and how clothes conveyed time, seasons, ages, lifetimes and chronological periods. Textiles moreover symbolized eternity and destiny, as the spinning goddesses of fate called Moirai by the ancient Greeks. These goddesses spin, measure and cut the thread of a person's life.

The book invites university students in history, archaeology and classics, as well as interested readers, craft communities and Humanities scholars to reflect on diverse dimensions of time in ancient Greece through the study of textiles and clothes.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• 1 Time and textiles in ancient Greece
• 2 Textiles as a marker of the beginning of time and of an era
• 3 First textiles
• 4 Textiles and time cycles: chronology, seasons, rhythm, and sequences of tasks
• 5 The long hours to make textiles – Penelope’s time
• 6 Textile terms in a time perspective: “Words survive longer than cloth”
• 7 The lifespan and timespan of garments
• 8 Clothing for life chapters, life stages and lifetime
• 9 Dressing for special transition points in time and status
• 10 Annual and cyclic times in festivals for textile work
• 11 Woven lifetime – textiles as time capsules of memories in Greek tragedy
• 12 Dress changes
• 13 Conclusion – following the threads up to today
• Epilogue. The long time of textiles, the short time of a T-shirt
• Ancient sources
• Series overview
• Index