Behold 1,600-Year-Old Egyptian Socks Made with Nålbindning, an Ancient Proto-Knitting Technique

We have, above, a pair of socks. You can tell that much by look­ing at them, of course, but what’s less obvi­ous at a glance is their age: this pair dates back to 250–420 AD, and were exca­vat­ed in Egypt at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. That infor­ma­tion comes from the site of the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, where you can learn more about not just these Egypt­ian socks but the dis­tinc­tive, now-van­ished tech­nique used to make socks in Egypt at the time: “nål­bind­ning, some­times called knot­less net­ting or sin­gle nee­dle knit­ting — a tech­nique clos­er to sewing than knit­ting,” which, as we know it, would­n’t emerge until the eleventh cen­tu­ry in Islam­ic Egypt. The tech­nique still remains in use today.

Time con­sum­ing and skill-inten­sive, nålbind­ning pro­duced espe­cial­ly close-fit­ting gar­ments, and “fit is of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance in a cold cli­mate but also for pro­tect­ing feet clothed in san­dals only.” And yes, it seems that socks like these were indeed worn with san­dals, a func­tion indi­cat­ed by their split-toe con­struc­tion.

A few years ago, we fea­tured archae­o­log­i­cal research here on Open Cul­ture point­ing to the ancient Romans as the first sock-and-san­dal wear­ers in human his­to­ry. These par­tic­u­lar socks were also made in the time of the Roman Empire, though they were unearthed at its far reach­es, from “the bur­ial grounds of ancient Oxyrhynchus, a Greek colony on the Nile.”

As Smithsonian.com’s Emi­ly Spi­vack writes, “We don’t know for sure whether these socks were for every­day use, worn with a pair of san­dals to do the ancient Egypt­ian equiv­a­lent of run­ning errands or head­ing to work — or if they were used as cer­e­mo­ni­al offer­ings to the dead (they were found by bur­ial grounds, after all).” But the fact that their appear­ance is so strik­ing to us today, at least six­teen cen­turies lat­er, reminds us that we aren’t as famil­iar as we think with the world that pro­duced them. And if, to our mod­ern eyes, they even look a bit goofy — though less goofy than they would if worn prop­er­ly, along with a pair of san­dals — we should remem­ber the painstak­ing method with which they must have been craft­ed, as well as the way they con­sti­tute a thread, as it were, through the his­to­ry of west­ern civ­i­liza­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ancient Egyp­tians Wore Fash­ion­able Striped Socks, New Pio­neer­ing Imag­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Imag­ing Reveals

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

An Ancient Egypt­ian Home­work Assign­ment from 1800 Years Ago: Some Things Are Tru­ly Time­less

3,200-Year-Old Egypt­ian Tablet Records Excus­es for Why Peo­ple Missed Work: “The Scor­pi­on Bit Him,” “Brew­ing Beer” & More

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

The Ancient Romans First Com­mit­ted the Sar­to­r­i­al Crime of Wear­ing Socks with San­dals, Archae­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Sug­gests

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.