The pillars of Hercules

by David Urquhart

But the Greeks may have invented it. The Greeks were copiers or copies; they improved what they received, but in the beginning they were wild and rude. This dress belongs to early simplicity, and to the people who from the first were pre-eminent in poetry.

But, taking it as if it were no more than letters or science, then if we find it both in Greece and Judæa, must we not hold it to be derivative in that country which in other respects has been the pupil, and primitive in that country which in other respects has been the mistress? Greece, when visited by the adventurers from the Holy Land, was in the rudest condition in which man could have existed, in regard to everything except the bright spirit of that race, the first light of which shone in aptitude for such teaching. Bloodshed was not the vehicle of “civilization,” nor lances the heralds of a faith. The fugitives and strangers who taught them how to sow and to weave, they made, while living, princes and chiefs, and worshipped when dead, as heroes. The Phœnicians introduced the costume of Greece, as they did her letters and her religion.

The resemblance is so evident between the toga and haïk, that the only question is, “Was it original or borrowed?” and if borrowed, “whence did it come?” As the Greeks stood to the Phœnicians, so did the Romans to the Etruscans. Critical inquiries had already traced that people to Canaan: recent discoveries have made us familiar with them. Their tombs, into which a lady has conducted us, transport us to the life and manners of the Old Testament. A traveller in Barbary might take them for the ancient sepulchres of this country. In the tombs you have over and over again the haïk.

The Etruscans were merely a colony: they recorded the date of their arrival, and kept the birth-day of their city. It has been a question recently raised—whence they did come. Müller brings them from the Alps: Mrs. Hamilton Grey, from Africa.[290] The toga must have been, of necessity, in the country from which they came, for they did not come naked. Had the haïk been then as now restricted to Barbary, I should at once admit the African derivation. But it is traced to Lydia.[291] A cast of one of the rock tombs in the British Museum, exhibits sculptured groups the size of life, with the colours still remaining, which shows us, as in a mirror, this ancient Phrygian people. There is the toga: it is worn over the head; men and women wear it alike. It is a group of Moors. Two boys appear; the head is shaved, with the exception of a tuft of hair on the crown! one of them carrying the oil-bottle and strigil. No other ancient people shaved the head; we only hear of it among the people of Mauritania, and that in respect to the children. The Moors, as I shall show, had the bottle from the earliest times. These boys are perfectly naked, while all the others are dressed. To-day, among Easterns and Mussulmans, and, to their infinite disgust, the Moors alone preserve the ancient practice of bathing naked.

The same peculiarity is observed in the Etruscan tombs: the noble youths served naked at their entertainments. Thus, with the strigil, the toga would serve to suggest Lydia or Lycia as the source of the Etruscans, if Herodotus had not recorded the tradition, or the Etruscans themselves had not claimed this ancestry. This tomb enables me to say that the manners of ancient Phrygia (I use as a general name that of the chief of the states of Asia Minor) are, at the distance of three thousand years, preserved with a fidelity of imitation, or an identity of character, in modern Barbary, such as at the interval of thirty years can scarcely be reckoned on in Europe. The toga and the strigil are indeed common among other people; but the shaving is a peculiarity, the value of which I will show elsewhere; and the preservation, singly in Morocco, of the whole of those features which this tomb presents, must go far to identify the ancient inhabitants of the western districts of Asia and Africa, or the Phrygians and the Brebers, and supports my derivation of the name Africa from Phrygia, which I imagine was given to the latter country, while Breber was given to the Phrygians; that is, that the names, severally preserved in Asia and Africa, were then common to the two countries and people.

Toga, from tego, to cover: ancient as is the epithet, it could not be original, for it was the coat of peace, and they commenced as banditti. They were not a nation, but a city of aliens and refugees. I know not what the Romans could call their own, save the master-spirit of selection and retention, as the Greeks had of curiosity (περιεργία) and embellishments.[292]

We have traced the course of the haïk along the shores of the Mediterranean; found it clothing Solomon, Hannibal, Pericles, Amalek, and Porsenna. We have carried it back to Hercules, to Abraham, and his fathers before him. Here is a monument of antiquity, to which the Propylæa of Memnon and Palaces of Ninus are modern structures. If in Pheleg’s time we know the earth was divided, when were the costumes? When the division took place, the original was reserved to the elder stock. If the clothes were varied with the tongues, then again must this one have kept its Edom dialect. Through Babel over the Flood, and dropping there all its associates from amongst the devices of man, or the works of his hands, it strides backwards alone till it reaches the first family’s solitary cot, where it grew between Eve’s soft fingers. We find it still the chief work in the far West of Eve’s fair daughters;—no pauper child has sighed over its fibres, nor have the spindles begun their turning to the dismal tinkling of the factory bell.

Haïks are like leaves of trees—you never see two alike:—as sentences are interminable, yet the syntax one, so have haïks their grammar. They are of all textures—of many substances—plain, striped, yet uniform. Silk and cotton are mixed together; both are mingled with wool; they are alternated in stripes. The texture varies from felt to sarcenet, from coarse blanketting to gauze; there is the massive fold defying the tempest—the gossamer wing trembling with a breath; colours are not excluded, gold is not forbidden. The most beautiful specimen of workmanship and taste I ever saw, was a white haïk with a deep border of gold.

The haïk of the men is absolutely and undeviatingly white. Colours are reserved for children, sometimes also for women, but they are associated always with the idea of indulgence and distinction. Thus was distinguished the daughter of David, Tamar, and this was what aroused the jealousy of Benjamin’s brothers, and when the last of the Ptolemies was saluted king of the Romans, he too received from the senate a coat of many colours.

To put on the haïk, it is dropped on the ground; one corner is lifted and brought over the left shoulder, and held upon the breast by the right hand. Then, by stepping backwards, the fold passes behind, and is brought under the right arm round in front. Another step across it, and it is behind again; then taken by both hands outstretched, it is brought over the head, measured so as to be left hanging low enough on both sides for the play of the arms. The end is then thrown over the left shoulder and hangs down the back. There are no ties, no buttons, no separate parts: the drapery is wrapped round with the sole fastening of its own folds. Dispensing with so many adjuncts, it supersedes all intermediaries. It is made under the tent; there is no tailor wanted; no shopman, no dealer, required; this is the link between a national costume and a people’s well-being. The Spaniard’s cloak, of which the style consists in the lap thrown over the left shoulder, is a mixture of the haïk and the bornoos: to this day the Spaniard looks upon the want of a cloak as the want of decent covering;—to be without a cloak is, as it were, to be naked.