I thought that my ex-boyfriend owned the world’s oldest trousers. He bought them when he went off to college, in 1952, and I found them disintegrating in the back of his closet, some sixty years later, though he refused to part with them. As far as I know, they are still there.
But now it appears that an even older pair of trousers—some two thousand nine hundred and forty-eight years older—has come to light. According to a paper in Quarternary International, the garment was unearthed by a team of scientists excavating the tombs in an ancient burial ground, the Yanghai graveyard, in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of western China. This vast cemetery, which covers an area of two square miles, was discovered in the nineteen-seventies by local villagers. It lies on the fringes of the Taklamakan desert, close to the Turfan oasis, in the Tarim Basin, a stopping place for nomads of the Bronze Age and, later, for the caravans of the Silk Route. The extreme dryness of the climate preserved the bodies and their grave goods to a remarkable degree, including perishable items like clothing and food. In one tomb, there was a basket of fruit and leaves near the mummy of a presumed shaman and, next to his head, a stash of cannabis that was still green.
Desert people are sometimes ascetic, but apparently not these people, herders and warriors of the steppes, who had European features and DNA from Central Asia. Grapevines covered some of the bodies; women were buried with symbolic phalluses, and men with vulvas, suggesting a ludic conception of the afterlife. Fashion and sex go hand-in-glove, as it were, and the Yanghai tombs (some five hundred have been probed) also contained colorful sheepskin boots, silk scarves, tasseled cloaks, jaunty feathered hats, and exciting lingerie: a woman’s fringed miniskirt, with a hip-hugging waistband, and a man’s tiny loincloth that wouldn’t have covered much of the family jewels.
The three-thousand-year-old trousers were in amazing shape. They were lying with the remains of two herders/warriors, both about forty. Experts surmise that the garments were custom sized for the wearer by the tailor who made them. (No cutting was involved; he or she loomed the wool in three pieces—two straight legs and a roomy crotch that were stitched together with thread that matched the yarn. Decorative stripes, zigzags, and a meander were woven into the cloth.) They also surmise that bifurcated garments to protect the lower body from chafing evolved with the domestication of horses, about four millennia ago, so these may have been the first jodhpurs! But not all equestrian cultures were so practical. The horsemen in the friezes on the Parthenon wear skimpy chitons over bare legs, and one hero looks nude. Centuries later, Roman cavalrymen were still doing pantless battle, and the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius, in Rome’s Piazza del Campidoglio, may once have been clad in gold, but the emperor’s seat is barely covered by his tunic.
As far as we know, trousers are a relatively recent addition to the human wardrobe. (Ötzi the Iceman, a Neolithic hunter who died some five thousand years ago, and whose frozen mummy was discovered in the Alps, in 1991, wore a leather loincloth and leggings under a grass coat.) They are, of course, a very recent addition to the female wardrobe, and, historically, they have symbolized emancipation. Joan of Arc wore trousers with her armor. Pétroleuses flaunted them on the barricades of the Paris Commune. George Sand was notorious for her men’s suits. Lady cyclists inspired outrage and ridicule in the late nineteenth century when they sallied forth in bloomers, which were subsequently adopted by the suffrage movement. Margaret Thatcher, a champion of conservative values, always wore skirts, but Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel are rarely seen in them. Orthodox Jews, the Amish, Mormon fundamentalists, and other traditional religious sects take their cue from Deuteronomy 22:5, which prohibits women from wearing “that which pertaineth to a man.” But someone should point out, so I will, that the Biblical dress code—flowing robes and a covered head—was refreshingly unisex.
Well into the twentieth century, French women had to petition the prefect of police to wear pants in public, except on the stage, and permission was granted only when they had some plausible excuse, such as mountain climbing. (The law was still on the books, though unenforced, until Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the Minister for Women’s Rights, rescinded it last year.) Islamic notions of female modesty don’t specifically exclude trousers, but the Sudanese penal code classes them as “obscene,” and in 2009 a group of feminists, led by the journalist Lubna al-Hussein, was arrested in Khartoum for wearing them to a protest. Ten of the protesters were flogged.
It is sad but not surprising to discover that the Muslim Uyghur descendants of those ancient horsemen, and of the genius who came up with the idea of trousers, are under pressure, from the Chinese authorities, to abandon their ethnic dress. According to a press release from the Uyghur Human Rights Project, issued a month ago, men with beards and women in headscarves are being “encouraged” to shave, in the former instance, and to unveil themselves, in the latter. The initiative that was launched to promote Uyghur sartorial conformity sounds like Heidi Klum, not Xi Jinping, thought it up. It’s called “Project Beauty.”
Just to give the chronology of trouser-wearing some perspective, I would like to note that Quarternary International is a journal of “quarternary science,”—that is, the study of the most recent period on the geologic time scale, the Cenozoic Era, which began some 2.6 million years ago and is still going on. You can learn a lot about the advances of humankind, sartorial and other, from its Web site: that, for example, cavemen invented recycling; that Pleistocene hominids picked their teeth; and that dogs may have given Homo sapiens our evolutionary edge. As the era progresses, or perhaps devolves, my ex-boyfriend’s trousers may be of some interest to the editors.
Photograph: M Wagner/German Archaeological Institute.
