History of Linen

A linen mummy shroud (with the mummy inside it)
Egypt, about 1000 BC (Vatican Museum, Rome)

Linen is one of the earliest fibers to be made into string and cloth. It comes from the flax plant, which grows all over the Mediterranean region. Flax is a tall, reed-like plant, with long fibers which make it easy to spin into thread. You pick the plants, and then leave them to soak in a tub of water or a stream until the hard outside stem rots away and leaves the long, soft fibers underneath. This is called retting the flax.

Then you take the fibers and spin them on a spindle into linen thread. Linen can be spun coarse, or it can be spun very very fine, depending on the skill of the spinner and what you want to use it for. The Egyptians made sails out of coarse linen, for example, but used very fine linen for expensive tunics. It is hard to dye linen, so mostly people wore it white, the way it is naturally. It is not as warm as wool, but it is much softer and more comfortable on the skin (after you wear it a while; at first it is stiff and scratchy).

People were spinning and weaving linen by about 5000 BC, even before wool. In the first millennium BC, the Egyptians mostly wore linen, while Greeks and West Asians and Germans mostly wore wool. By the Roman period, however, many people wore linen tunics for comfort with wool robes over them for warmth, and in the Middle Ages in Europe this continued to be common, so that "linen" got to mean something like "underwear". Our word "lingerie" is related to linen. In the Islamic Empire, on the other hand, people began to wear mainly linen and cotton, and not so much wool.

To find out more about linen, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:

Eyewitness: Costume, by L. Rowland-Warne (2000). For kids, but mainly European clothing, from earliest times to modern.

World Textiles: A Concise History, by Mary Schoeser (2003). For adults.

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1995). Not for kids, but an interested high schooler could read it. Fascinating ideas about the way people made cloth in ancient times, and why it was that way.

Spinning
Weaving
Cotton
Wool
Silk
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