After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt and the Levant in 1517, the Ottomans succeeded in diverting the seat of the caliphate, the symbol of Islamic spiritual and political rule, from Mameluke Cairo to Ottoman Istanbul. Egypt was no longer the regional arbiter of taste and social demarcation. It went hand in hand with its diminishing status as the regional political authority and turned into a position of subordination instead of dominance. After Egypt enjoyed the status as the center of several Islamic Empires (Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mameluke), with Cairo as its capital for 5 centuries, it was demoted into a mere provincial administration.

 The ruling class and court officials in the newly subjugated Mameluke-owned territories in Egypt, the Hejaz region, the Levant, and southern Anatolia were ordered to discard Mameluke attire and don Ottoman attire, signifying the change in the political leadership. Despite enjoying a short-lived period of revival even after the Ottoman conquest, Mameluke headgear was completely wiped from Egyptian court fashion, and it was replaced with Ottoman turbans and caftans. Ottoman court costumes took over Arab fashion until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920.

 Fashions of the higher echelons are more pliable and easily susceptible to change following the replacement of the governing establishment, unlike the clothing for the commoner, which is resistant to change and slowly absorbs foreign influences. It’s apparent that from the beginning of the 16th century, upper-class Cairene women began to imitate the fashions of their Turkish sovereigns in Istanbul. Whereas the common folk, or the peasant class (Fellaheen), which constituted the majority of the Egyptian population, wore more indigenous or “traditional” clothing, if so to speak.

The fall of the Mameluke dynasty and the ushering in of the Ottoman period in Egypt, particularly regarding Egyptian dress modes and lifestyle, is very murky due to the termination of the flourishing manuscript artwork tradition and pictorial representation in Mameluke Egypt. However, as a consequence of the Ottoman annexation of Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, travel became safer. Sultan Selim I protected European traders and pilgrims, and then, when the printing press was invented in the mid-15th century, details and images of travelers became more widely dispersed, encouraging more people to make the voyage to the Middle East. This was also a catalyst for the emergence of the European costume book literature.

With easier travel between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, European artists and explorers flocked to the region. Thus, bringing for the first time Western realism and naturalism through the depiction of costumes donned by Ottoman contemporaries, a contrasting attitude from the abstract and figurative art styles of the East.

 The abundance of visual sources and actual complete dress examples for examination, in contrast to the dearth of such materials in previous Islamic eras (Mameluke, Abbasid, and Fatimid), was indispensable to the study of Ottoman dress and the dress of the inhabitants of their respective provinces.

Dress can express the distinction between various ethnic, religious, and social groups. The Islamic world, despite the term, was not made up of Muslims but encompassed various religious communities, denominations, cultures, and ethnolinguistic identities under its banner. Muslims, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Africans, Druze, Kurds, Persians, Arabs, Turks, Albanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians lived in the Empire, and each ethnic group and sect had distinguishing clothes or even headgear demarcating them from the other.

It’s noteworthy that those European travelers voyaging around the different territories of the Ottoman Empire illustrated the differences between these groups in their costume books through their dress.

Clothing of the Ottoman Woman

The regalia and dress of the Ottoman Sultans were undoubtedly representative of their status symbol as rulers of the Mediterranean and their political dominion, which stretched over three continents. They wore multiple layers and incorporated fabrics that were very ostentatious and sumptuous in nature. Their ceremonial caftan, worn during court sessions and important dignitary meetings with foreign ambassadors, was made of fabrics such as brocade, velvet, satin atlas, silk lampas, taffeta, mohair, and cashmere.

The pomp and splendor of the women of the Ottoman dynasty matched the men’s sumptuous textiles in their caftans and robes, not to mention their elaborate headgear, hairstyles, and jewelry. Women living in the lesser provinces, especially in the capitals and metropolitan cities, were eager followers of the latest fashions in vogue, which were popularized by the women in the Ottoman harem.

The typical clothing of an elite 16th-century Ottoman woman consisted of several layers worn inside her domestic quarters and several more layers when outside.

The order of these layers began with undergarments similar to the undergarment layers (qamis (chemise), ghilalah (slip), & sirwal (drawers)) worn in the Mameluke, Ayyubid, Fatimid, and Abbasid Periods, but with different terminology. First, a long undershirt or chemise (gömlek) and drawers (don & çakşır), and most of the time, they were made from soft and delicate materials. The çakşır was made from striped or printed silks, or a cotton and silk blend for the wealthy, but poorer women might’ve used linen or plain-weave cotton.

Then, an intermediary layer consisting of a variety of inner coats or robes is worn on top of the undergarments. First, a hip-length outer robe called a zıbın. The zıbın could be sleeveless, short-sleeved, or long-sleeved. Then several over-garments could be worn, which were similar in their cut and appearance to the zıbın, like the yelek (crotch-length robe), and entari (floor-length robe), all girt with a belt or a sash.

Then the final layer, usually worn when the woman ventures outside the house, was the caftan or ferace (fe-RAH-je), a long-sleeved outer coat, but the ferace was more loosely fitted than the caftan.

Other than the staple final coat worn outside the house, there were a great deal of layer combinations that a woman may choose depending on her taste and style. She can wear multiple layers, each with a different length and sleeve, depending on the occasion or the formality of the event. Sometimes, there were also detachable sleeves worn under these short-sleeved coats.

Clothing of Ottoman Upper-Class Egyptian Women

The sojourning of European pilgrims and travelers to the Holy Land (en route through Egypt) was established as a consequence of the Ottoman conquest of much of the Mediterranean. Besides the religious sanctity of the Holy Land to European Christendom, Egypt itself occupied a great spiritual and religious significance in the Christian imagination. Egypt’s biblical association with the exodus in the Old Testament and the story of the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt, and the pilgrimage to monastic sites in Egypt, particularly St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, continued to be of importance in the Latin West.

Starting from the 16th century forward, a barrage of accounts about Egyptian women’s costumes started to appear in European travelogues.

The first chronicle of women’s clothing in Ottoman Egypt was first published in Pierre Belon’s 1553, Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables, trouvees en Grece, Asie, Judée, Egypte, Arabie & autres pays estranges. Looking at Pierre Belon’s illustrations of 16th-century Cairene women, we could see a resemblance between the costumes of Egyptian ladies living in the Cairene province and their contemporaries living in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. Although we can’t make out the layers worn under the outer coat (Ferace) in Belon’s illustrations, we can surmise that it was a combination of a hip-length yelek or a caftan for the inner layers. Then a gomlek or qamis and shalwar or Shintiyan for undergarments.

Depictions of female attire from Portraits d’oiseaux, animaux, serpents, herbes, arbres, hommes et femmes d’Arabie et d’Egypte, 1553.

The illustration of the Turkish woman shows her in Ottoman garb, presumably a ferace as the outermost layer. However, unlike Turkish women, perhaps keeping up with traditional mores, Egyptian (and Levantine) women usually enveloped themselves with large mantles when they ventured outdoors, in a similar manner to what they were accustomed to during the Middle Ages (Mamluk, Ayyubid, Fatimid, Abbasid).

 

The next account is from the French travelogue, Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de plusieurs villes et forteresses, tant de l’Europe, Asie, & Afrique, published in 1564 by the French writer, Antoine du Pinet. On Cairene women’s clothing, he writes:

“The women are very richly dressed, and moreover adorned with fine jewelry, on collars as well as chains. They wear very rich headdresses, which are the length of a good palm. Their dresses are variegated like those of the Germans, except that those of the Egyptians are richly decorated. Over these dresses, they wear Hoppelands or Blaudes (long-sleeved robes) of fine cotton cloth from the Levant, which is brought from the Indies. They have a veil in front of the face of a certain kind, which is a little rough and light-textured, to better see the men at their side, without being seen. Their footwear consists of boots and pumps made very nicely in the Turkish style.“.

In 1590, Jacques de Villamont wrote:

“Turkish women wear their chemises of very fine cotton or taffeta of various colors, made similarly to those of the men, but much more embellished at the collar, sleeves, and all around: over them they have a long silk camisole with fringes all around, which is lined with cotton and a very fine cloth, stitched with a needle very close to each other, with narrow sleeves and a narrow busk, and a collar somewhat open at the front: moreover, they are dressed in their Dolyman and underpants like the men”.

A few years later, Henry Castella, who traveled in Egypt in the years 1597-1601, described that same costume:

“They wear up to three different kinds of accoustremens, and their sleeves are so wide (I think he means long) that some of them reach down to the knee: namely, the two outer robes, a little less long than the other, and a cloth like a large shroud that covers them all”.

In the early seventeenth century, Jean Coppin (Sauneron (ed.), 1971, p. 117 and pp. 120-121) describes the two costumes:

“the poor are dressed in dyed canvas, and in the heat have only a blue shirt with their underpants and their belt”; and mentioned townswomen: “They wear a shirt with fairly long sleeves that go down to halfway down their legs; those of rich people are usually decorated at the edges and openings with needlepoint silk embroidery; over it they wear something like one of our justeaucorps […] Over this justeaucorps, they wear a second one that is much shorter than the first.”¹

Salomon Schwinger, in his 17th-century travelogue, meticulously detailed how Turkish women layer their garments and provided readers with auxiliary illustrations. This is very helpful in gathering information on Egyptian women’s undergarments and overgarments that were worn at the time and were not necessarily shown by Belon’s illustrations. Although Schwinger wrote this in the early years of the 17th century, given how consistent and unchanged Eastern clothing stays for a long time, we assume the average high-born Egyptian lady living in the metropolis of the Egyptian capital wore similar garments to her peers in Istanbul.

He first starts by describing their most intimate undergarments:

“In the manner described below, the Tarckian women are dressed from the foot up: (A) on her bare body through shiny, wide trousers made of silk or delicate linen.

(B) over the trousers, she wears a translucent shirt of raw/yellow/blue also of silk or linen/on the head a little cap made of silk pieces or silk stuff/in the form of a bathing hat/weave only one braid is placed in a sack of gold pieces/or similar expensive stuff/as can be seen here/let the hair partly hang on his face/stands on wooden shoes/ground with paint or with silver covered with other metal sheets. (C) has a quilted silk body over the shirt. She has boots on her legs up to the knee joints/and a hat with a black band.

 

 

Furthermore, in the next figure, with (D.E.) follows how she talks about the skirt. .. wears a long tunic down to the feet made of silk/as an atlas, has a gold gilding on the hat and has pearls hanging on it/the smallest pair of shoes costs no less than a thaler (silver German coin)/the overcoat is made of a small English cloth/there are also precious neck and arm jewels! usually a gold bracelet/ plus the earrings/ and a finger with an embedded stone. They hang a cloth around the waist

(F) They cover the face with a transparent black hairy visor / then they cannot be seen / just like the histories report from the Fama or Deo bona / they were so chaste and retired / that no one saw them in their lifetime. So they are never seen by the great lords of the court and servants, and they were on the estates, they stretch/ cloths from their room to the Kobelwagen / from both sides / so that no man can see them / so that they can look straight in / like between two walls from the main door to the Kobelwäaen.

The men go no less in splendor and luxury. Superficially, however, they are dressed like women, and there is no difference between their clothing. In the same way, the children will also be beautifully decorated and decorated with silk and gold and decorated with gold.”

 

The Dutch traveler Cornelis de Bruijn visited Cairo in 1698 and also remarked on the similarity of the dress of the inhabitants of Cairo to that of the Turks, despite their various ethnic backgrounds:

“They [Arabs] dress in the colors like that of the Turks, and as elegantly decorated as everyone’s sensuality entails: they generally have two buttons on their waistcoat or skirt, one large and the other small. , the large elongated, and the other round: see her clothing and figure at No. 91. When they go out, they put a white linen cloth to cover themselves, over the head and the entire body, so that they can see through it with only one eye, after the Spanish manner.”

“The custom of the Jews here in the Land is the same as at No. 92. image. The turban must be mixed with blue stripes, and the rest of the clothing with a violet color, which they are obliged to wear as their badge; otherwise, there is no distinction between theirs and those of the Turks. The Jewish women have, similarly – No. 93. indicate, a very long black ball on the head, which is braided with brown and white-nose cloths, embroidered with gold and silver. The clothes are generally made of striped silk. When I drew the one depicted here, she was sitting on her sofa, smoking a pipe of tobacco, like an Egyptian, of which type of pipes has been spoken of here.”

The similarity between the dress of the upper classes of Istanbul and Cairo is further attested in Richard Pococke’s 1743 travel accounts. In his Description of the East and Other Countries, the 18th-century English traveler commented on the attire of Egyptian women:

“The dress of the women, according to the manner of Constantinople, is not much unlike that of the men, only most of their undergarments are of silk, as well as their drawers; and all but the outer vest are shorter than the mens, and their sleeves are made to hang down, a sort of gauze shirt coming down near to the ground under all. Their heads are dressed with an embroidered handkerchief, and the hair platted round, having on a white woolen skull-cap.”

The illustrations below by Pococke depict two Egyptian women and an Arab woman. The Arab woman is dressed in Turkish costume: A hip-length entari over an undergarment, a gomlek over striped ankle-length drawers. Her head is covered with a simple veil. She gathers her plaits in a sack (similar to the Turkish manner mentioned by Schwinger) and has an ornament decoration attached at the end. Unlike the two Egyptian women, she doesn’t veil her face.

The Egyptian woman riding the mule is from Cairo, so naturally, she dressed herself after the fashion of Istanbul. She is wearing a long-sleeved outer coat, a ferace, along with the usual inner coats yelek/entari under the ferace. She covers her face with an eye-veil and wears a long shawl on her head with a trim decoration at the edge, and has pinned it under her chin. Her manner of dress is quite similar to the imagery of Ottoman Turkish women found in various costume books by European travelers and miniatures in Ottoman manuscripts.

As for the woman in the middle, probably of middle to low class, she wears the traditional Egyptian costume. It is hard to discern what each layer looks like because they are covered with the black mantle, but she is probably wearing a simple dress with long sleeves, and two mantles called hibarah, and a face veil, a niqab that Pococke amusingly calls a “bib”.

It’s always so delightful to read these descriptions of Middle Eastern conventions and manners from a foreigner’s point of view and how they conceptualized the various abnormalities and unusual sights they encountered during their visits from within their own cultural background and worldview.

A Description of the East: And Some Other Countries, Dresses particular to Egypt – Pococke Richard – 1743

The French campaign led by Napoleon Bona’part in Egypt (1798-1801) was accompanied by a contingent of European scientists, scholars, artists, and archeologists, bringing over a new fascination with Egypt. There were several depictions of Egyptian women, elite or common, in the multi-series publication Description de l’Égypte.

In The Manners of the Modern Egyptians, Edward Lane describes the dress of 19th-century Egyptian upper-class women as follows:

“The dress of the women of the middle and higher orders is handsome and elegant. Their shirt is very full, like that of the men—but rather shorter—reaching not quite to the knees: it is also, generally, of the same kind of material as the men’s shirt, or of coloured crape—sometimes black.

A pair of very wide trousers (called “shintiyán”), of a coloured striped stuff of silk and cotton, or of printed, or worked, or plain white muslin, is tied round the hips, under the shirt, with a dikkeh: its lower extremities are drawn up and tied just below the knee with running strings; but it is sufficiently long to hang down to the feet, or almost to the ground, when attached in this manner.

Over the shirt and shintiyán is worn a long vest (called “yelek”), of the same material as the latter: it nearly resembles the kuftán of the men; but is more tight to the body and arms: the sleeves also are longer; and it is made to button down the front, from the bosom to a little below the girdle, instead of lapping over: it is open, likewise, on each side, from the height of the hip, downwards.

In general the yelek is cut in such a manner as to leave half of the bosom uncovered, except by the shirt; but many ladies have it made more ample at that part: and, according to the most approved fashion, it should be of a sufficient length to reach to the ground, or should exceed that length by two of three inches, or more.

A short vest (called “anter′ee”), reaching only a little below the waist, and exactly resembling a yelek of which the lower part has been cut off, is sometimes worn instead of the latter. A square shawl, or an embroidered kerchief, doubled diagonally, is put loosely round the waist as a girdle; the two corners that are folded together hang down behind. Over the yelek is worn a gibbeh of cloth, or velvet, or silk, usually embroidered with gold or with colored silk: it differs in form from the gibbeh of the men chiefly in being not so wide, particularly in the fore part; and is of the same length as the yelek. Instead of this, a jacket (called “saltah”), generally of cloth or velvet, and embroidered in the same manner as the gibbeh, is often worn.”

 

 Women’s costumes in Edward Lane’s Manners of the Modern Egyptians, 1845

Headgear

The distinguishing element between male and female clothing was their headgear. In Ottoman manuscript art, the men are wearing these gigantic turbans over elongated caps; however, these turbans never appear outside of ceremonies or court settings, usually with a decorative aigrette to finish the look. Women’s headgear consisted of low-rise brimless cylindrical caps called tarpus or an arakcin in which a decorative headband or faux-turban was wrapped. Over the caps, veils or shawls were worn, and the caps were decorated with an aigrette like the men. These aigrettes signified rank and distinction between the women in the Harem based on their decoration and size.

Surprisingly, the goblet-like headdress called Tartur/Tantour/Tatari, popularized in the 15th-century Mameluke Egypt, was absent from Ottoman portraiture until about the early 17th century. One would think that the headgear popularized by the ethnically Turco-Mongolian Mamelukes that ruled Egypt and the Levant beginning from the late 13th century would also be fashionable among their fellow Turkic brethren in Anatolia. In Ottoman sources, this headdress was called a hotoz.

Pierre Belon in his Les Observations: “The distinction of the headdress worn by the Egyptians is very noteworthy, for it is ancient, such as can be seen portrayed in various medals. The authors have called it Turritum capitis ornamentum, or turritam coronam, or vittam turri-tam. As one would say, the headdress is fashioned in the manner of a tower. One wears high earthen shoes, and the other wears boots with iron heels, in the manner of the Turks. And since such a manner of headdress reflects so much of its antiquity, it is easy to observe, seeing that it seems that our Latin poets have made mention of it.”

Yet, there is an illustration of a Turkish woman sketched by Gentile Bellini around 1480, where she is wearing a headdress similar to a perfume sprinkler [qumqum] with a turban wrapped around it. She is clad in a vertical striped short-sleeved caftan that is buttoned over a horizontal long-sleeved inner caftan or shift. This variety resembles the Lebanese Tantour rather than the wide top, narrow bottom tartur in Egypt or tatari worn by the ethnically Turkic Mameluke court ladies.

High headgear worn by Egyptian women was also noted in Cornelis de Bruyn’s travel account, describing it as such:

“What the [Arab] women care about, they have on the head, like a high ball-point of a hat, which they wrap around with a black or brown cloth, interwoven with gold or silver stripes; the dress is of color like that of the Turks, and as elegantly decorated, as everyone’s sensuality entails: They generally have two buttons on their waist, or skirt, one large and the other small, the large elongated, and the other round: see her clothing and figure at N 91. When they go out, they wear a white linen cloth to cover themselves, over the head and the entire body, so that they can see through it with only one eye, in the Spanish manner.”

 

 

Veils

For the most part, female head coverings comprise a foundational cap which is encircled with a band or a small turban, and then a large veil tops the whole attire. Several contemporary illustrations show unusual shapes on the heads of Turkish women because the veils trace the silhouette of the headdress worn under it. The size and design of these veils were not standardized, but it was left up to the taste, style, or specific occasion in which the veil was worn. Illustrations and imagery produced by local and foreign artists relayed that women in the Ottoman Empire decorated their veils with fringes, trimmings, and decorated bands.

Pierre Belon was unimpressed with the manner in which Arab and Egyptian women wore their veils in his 16th-century book. He said:

“The way of the Arab and Egyptian village women is, in my opinion, the ugliest of all, because they put on a black or other colored cotton cloth over their eyes, which hangs in front of their faces, pointing towards the chin, like the muzzle of a damsel, called a barbute, and to have seen through this linen, they make two holes in the place of the two eyes, so much so that they being thus dressed, resemble those who fight on Good Friday in Rome or in Avignon. But those of the larger towns see the manner which they learned from the Turks, who put a little veil woven from the hairs of a horse’s tail to the front of the face. And those who are of greater status have a fine linen untied in front of their face.”

His description of the so-called “barbute” matches the shape and style of a niqab or a burqu, a popular face covering worn by Muslim women in the Middle Ages. It was a long piece of fabric with two slits for the eyes that a woman tied around her head and let it drape over her face, covering it completely. As for the veil of horse hair worn in the manner of the Turks, it was most likely the peçe.

Salomon Schwinger, in his 17th-century visit to Istanbul, remarking on Ottoman Turkish women’s peçes, described the same eye-veil mentioned by Belon as a visor. This veil thought to have been popularized by the Ottomans is in actuality a pre-existing veil called sha’riyah (from sha’r meaning hair or animal fur)–referencing its base material of goat or animal hair, and had been mentioned in the geniza trousseaux lists as a female article of covering and been used in Egypt, the Levant and Iraq at least as early as the 11th century. There is a depiction of a woman in a congregation scene from a 13th-century manuscript of Maqamat Al-Hariri, where she has a transparent eye-veil that falls over her eyes.

 

  

The clothing of the Fellahin (peasantry) and lower castes in Egypt

 The dress of the common Egyptians has been consistent in its shape and style since Ancient times, from their Pharaonic dynasties, through the Christian Coptic periods, and after the Arabo-islamic conquest of Egypt in the 7th century.

The dress of the Egyptian has been a plain long shirt with a slit from the neck to the chest or below. Pictorial representations of such dress, in addition to archeological materials retrieved from excavated sites, attest to the unbroken chain of the national costume of Egypt, the Gallabiyyah. The Gallabiyyah, a spacious and wide-sleeved gown with a slit in the middle, has been the hallmark of Egyptian peasantry that was written about or illustrated by travel accounts as far back as the 18th, 17th, and even 16th century, and across the Middle Ages.

This garment has been the subject of depiction in orientalist paintings by enthusiastic European painters who visited Egypt in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Salomon Schwinger visited Egypt on his way to the Holy Land at the beginning of the 17th century. In his book “Ein newe Reiss Beschreibung auss Teutschland nach Constantinopel und Jerusalem“, he remarked on the simplicity of dress of the common man and woman and that, unlike Europe’s harsh winter climate, people living in this hot and dry weather can go about their daily routines with very minimal clothing. Other European travelers to Egypt, such as Pococke in the 18th century and Lane in the 19th century, noted similar remarks.

 

In his Description of the East and Other Countries in 1745, Richard Pococke recounted the dress of the common Egyptian man:

“The most simple dress in Egypt, resembles probably the primitive manner of clothing; for it is only a long shirt, A. in the fifty-eighth plate, which has wide sleeves. It is commonly tied about the middle, and many children in the country go naked all year round, as most of them do in the summer.

The common people wear over this a brown woolen shirt; those of the better condition have a long cloth coat over it, and then a long blue shirt; and the dress of ceremony over this, instead of blue, is a white shirt, which they put on upon festival days, and to pay great visits in upper Egypt but in the lower parts they use a shirt or garment made like it, of black woolen, which is sometimes by the more genteel left open before, and then is properly what they call a Ferijee; and some of the first condition have them of cloth, and fur, the Arabs and natives wearing their cloths with large sleeves, like the dress of ceremony of the Turks, called the Ferijee, made like a night-gown; the other dress of the Turks being with straight sleeves.

Most of them wear under all a pair of linen drawers B. and when their vests are open before, after the Turkish manner, it is an odd fight to fee the shirt hang down, which they do not put into the drawers, according to the Turkish custom with the men, tho’ not with the ladies; for the dress of the men in Turkey, is more modest than of the women, whereas in Europe it is rather the contrary.”

In the 19th century, Edward Lane reiterated the simplicity and plain form of this garment: “The costume of the men of the lower orders is very simple. These, if not of the very poorest class, wear a pair of drawers, and a long and full shirt or gown of blue linen or cotton, or brown woolen stuff (the former called “’eree,” and the latter “zaaboot”), open from the neck nearly to the waist, and have wide sleeves. Over this, some wear a white or red woolen girdle.”

 

A complete adult garment made of blue cotton, in addition to the wide sleeves and neck opening, which still has one of its string ties attached, has been excavated from the Qasr Ibrim, a fortified city on the Egyptian coastal shores of the Red Sea. The excavations led to the discovery of other types of garments, feminine veils, and children’s clothes. The garment has side gores, which add to the fullness of the skirt.

Female clothing

Peasant women and those of the lowest orders were similarly clad to the men. They wore simple and plain shirts that were suitable for their labor-intensive lifestyle and social standing. A long dress with a slit in the middle, sometimes with a button at the top, and with ample, wide sleeves, and few decorations. They wear a long face veil (some don’t) and a large veil on their heads.

In the early 17th century, the German Salomon Schwinger wrote in his travelogue:

“The Egyptian women or servants in common wear these white clothes/have only a white or blue shirt on/with wide sleeves/they wear green glass rings on their hands and feet/that make a sound when they walk/and they also ride in this form Alexandria and other places in Egypt, the Jewish and Egyptian women.”

 

 Richard Pococke, in his Description of the East and Other Countries, writes that the dress of the female commoner is as follows:

“The ordinary women wear a large linen or cotton blue garment, like a surplice; and before their faces hangs a sort of bib, which is joined to their head-dress by a tape over the nose; the space between being only for the eyes, which looks very odd. The others who wear this garment of silk have a large black veil that covers the face, and something of gauze that covers the face. It being reckoned a great indecency to show the whole face, they generally cover the mouth, and one eye, if they do not cover the whole.”

Ornaments

“The common women, especially the blacks, wear rings in their noses; into the rings they put a glass bead for ornament, as at Q. They wear on their ears large rings, three inches in diameter, that come round the ear, and are not put into it; these are ornamented as at R. The rings they wear on their fingers are such as are seen at V., which are sometimes of lead, but the better sort of women wear gold. Their bracelets T. are most commonly a work of wire: There are some of gold, finely jointed; a more ordinary fort are of plain iron or brass. They also wear such rings as at S. round their naked legs, most commonly made of brass among the vulgar, who also wear about their necks the ornament W. Among the common people, it is made of pewter, and in the cafe at the bottom, they put a paper with something written on it out of the Alcoran, as a charm against sickness and other evils. The other cafes seem to be designed for the same purposes.”

People of middling condition, instead of these, have many ornaments of silver, and often pieces of money hung to them, and sometimes ancient coins they happen to meet with; and even in the country, whenever they go out to wash at the river, or to fetch water, they put on all their attire, and appear in full dress. I have here added the ring X., which I saw at Alexandria; it is of gold and seems to have been the ring of a patriarch of Alexandria. What is cut in the gold is represented at Z.

 

 

Edward Lane’s account was the most extensive and descriptive of several travelers’ accounts of the costumes of Female Egyptian peasantry. He says:

“The dress of a large proportion of those women of the lower orders who are not of the poorest class consists of a pair of trousers or drawers (similar in form to the shintiyán of the ladies, but generally of plain white cotton or linen), a blue linen or cotton shirt (not quite so full as that of the men), a burko’ of a kind of coarse black crape, and a dark blue tarhah of muslin or linen.

Some wear over the shirt, or instead of the latter, a linen tób, of the same form as that of the ladies. The sleeves of this are often turned up over the head; either to prevent their being incommodious, or to supply the place of a tarhah.

In addition to these articles of dress, many women who are not of the very poor classes wear, as a covering, a kind of plaid, similar in form to the habarah, composed of two pieces of cotton, woven in small chequers of blue and white, or cross stripes, with a mixture of red at each end. It is called “miláyeh.” In general, it is worn in the same manner as the habarah, but sometimes like the tarhah.

Throughout the greater part of Egypt, the most common dress of the women merely consists of the blue shirt, or tób, and tarhah.”

 

 

 

1. Mehrez, S. (2000). Costumes of Egypt: The Lost Legacies, I. IFAO. ↩︎