The Scarf and the Cloak Prestige Garments for Aegean Elites

Abstract When seeking to identify elite personages in the Aegean iconographic record, the researcher faces the great problem that almost everyone seems to dress in the same rich apparel and there are no deciphered contemporary texts which can explain the meaning of the images. Yet the visual record does reveal that Aegean artists showed particular interest in fabric differentiation and this is especially true of the images on the Aegean seals, signet rings and sealings, each a piece of miniature relief art. The detail in these seal images provides a new lens through which to view gender and identity in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. This paper concentrates on an item that was named by Arthur Evans over a hundred years ago when he saw depictions of what seemed to be rolled-up cloth. He coined the term, “sacral knot” to describe it and so it has remained in the literature. However the seal detail published across the last 50 years establishes that there are actually two items subsumed under Evans’ term, one which we may call the “scarf knot” and the other the “cloak knot” and that the basis for these knots are two very different garments, the scarf and the cloak. When their characteristics are described with regard to the type of raw material used and the patterns observable and when attention is turned to their wearing, it becomes clear that the scarf designates elite females and that the cloak envelopes elite males. The primary use of these two prestige garments, with their underlying distinction of gender roles, is seen to provide the basis for their symbolic use in the knotted form. The scarf and the cloak are primarily Minoan prestige garments and both creations are testament to a sophisticated society that cherished their beautiful fabrics.