Archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man. He wore the woven wool pants with a poncho that belted around the waist, ankle-high boots, and a wool headband adorned with seashells and bronze discs.
The pants' basic design is strikingly similar to the pants most of us wear today, but close inspection reveals the level of thought and care that went into designing them.
Mounted herders and warriors needed their leg coverings to be flexible enough to allow a mounting horseman to swing a leg over a horse without ripping the fabric or feeling constricted. They also needed added reinforcement at crucial areas like the knees. How do you accomplish making something elastic at certain places and strong at others, and how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?
The makers of these 3,000 year old Chinese pants solved the problem by using various weaving techniques to produce fabric with different properties in different areas of the garment, yet the entire garment was one piece of cloth made of spun wool fibers.
Archaeologist Mayke Wagner and her colleagues from the German Archaeological Institute recently examined the ancient trousers in detail. A modern weaver created a replica of the pants to better understand the techniques used.
Roomy where it counts
Most of the pants are woven in what’s called twill, which is the same type of weave used in blue jeans. The oldest known twill fabric was found in the Hallstatt salt mine in Austria; it has been radiocarbon dated to between 3,500 and 3,200 years ago. Twill makes a diagonally ribbed, heavy fabric that’s also stretchier than the original wool thread.
Based on the other objects in his grave, which included a battle ax, a bridle, and a horse bit, Turfan Man was part of some sort of mounted force, what we call cavalry. The stretchy twill fabric would have saved him the embarrassment of ripping his pants every time he swung into the saddle. For added roominess, the weaver made the crotch piece of the pants wider at the center than the ends, so the piece of fabric could bunch up or stretch in the middle to give the wearer more flexibility where it counted.
Tough Where it Needs to Be
At the knees, the maker switched to a different weaving method, called tapestry weaving, which produces a less flexible but thicker, sturdier fabric. At the waist, a third weaving method provided a thick waistband to help hold the pants in place.
And all of those components were woven as a single piece; there's no evidence of any of the fabric having been cut.
Design Hints at Cross-Cultural Contact
The Turfan trousers are not only function, they are fashionable. As the weaver was working on that stretchy, roomy crotch piece, they alternated different colors of weft threads to create pairs of brown stripes on an off-white background. Zigzag stripes adorn the ankles and calves of the pants, along with a design similar to a step pyramid, leading Wagner and her colleagues to speculate that Turfan Man’s culture might have had contact with people in Mesopotamia, leading them to include ziggurats in a woven motif.
Other aspects of the pants reveal interactions between far-flung groups of people ranging from modern Kazakhstan to Eastern Asia. Across the knees, a pattern of tilted, interlocking T-shapes looks remarkably like a pattern that turned up on bronze containers from a 3,300-year-old site in China and on pottery at 3,800-to 3,000-year-old sites in Western Siberia—about the same age as the trousers but roughly 3,000 kilometers apart.
In other words, the world of 1,200 BC was no more isolated, provincial and devoid of trade and cross-cultural pollination than is today’s world.
Comment:
The search for “primitive” man continues, and continues to be frustrated by evidence that very ancient humans were also very intelligent and capable. The prejudice that the Germans call “urdummheit” or original stupidity, is based upon nothing other than the Darwinian view of human history. But this view is wrong, and we are warned away from believing that our generation is the best and the smartest:
True knowledge has decreased with every successive generation. God is infinite, and the first people upon the earth received their instructions from the infinite God who created the world. Those who received their knowledge direct from infinite wisdom were not deficient in knowledge. E. G. White, Spiritual Gifts, vol. IV, p. 154.
The truth is that mankind was as intelligent as he was ever going to be when God created Adam and breathed into him the breath of life.
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time. Eccl. 1:10