THE CLOTHING OF THE ANCIENTS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH.

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BY WILLIAM DUANE, JR.

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If the ancient inhabitants of the world had extreme difficulty in sheltering themselves from the severity of the seasons, they experienced much more in giving to their clothes the impress of art or industry. Consult Strabo; he will tell you that certain nations covered themselves with the bark of trees, fig-leaves or rushes, rudely intertwined. Often also the skins of animals were employed, without the least preparation, for the same end. In proportion as the barbarism disappeared which had been introduced by the confusion of tongues, they began to think of the wool of sheep, and to ask themselves if there were no means of uniting in a single thread the different pieces of this substance by the aid of a kind of spindle. Seeing their efforts crowned with success, “Let us now,” said they, “try to imitate the spider.” They did so; and, behold, as Democritus begs us to observe, the art of weaving invented! After that, the invariable custom which existed among the Jews, fifteen hundred years before Jesus Christ, of collecting the fleeces of their sheep at fixed periods; and great was the account which they made of it according to the testimony of Genesis (31, 19.)

The history, true or fabulous, of the web of Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, proves to us that wool was not the sole material to which they thought of applying the art of weaving. And do we not read in Pliny that “the cotton plant grew in Upper Egypt, that they made stuffs of it, and that the Egyptian priests made admirable surplices of it?” It is undeniable that garments of cotton and of linen were in use in the time of the patriachs; indeed Moses commands his people in the 22d chapter of Deuteronomy, “not to wear a dress of linen;” and the ancient Babylonians, as Herodotus informs us, (Book I.) “wore immediately over their skin a cambric tunic, which fell down to their feet in the oriental manner.” It was the same among the Athenians, according to Thucydides.