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PART III.

(CONTINUED.)

OF THE

CUSTOMS AND MANNERS OF ANCIENT AND MODERN NATIONS.

ILLUSTRATIONS

OF

SCRIPTURE,

IN THREE PARTS, &c.

CHAP. IV.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF SCRIPTURE FROM THE DRESS OF THE

ORIENTALS.

Dress of the orientals has undergone almost no change.-Materials of which it was manufactured-Fine linen-Sackcloth of hair-Silk and rich cloth. -Colours most in use.-Nobles and courtiers dressed in scarlet and crim

son.

-Vestments of different colours.-The form of their garments.—Restrictions in reference to dress.-Articles of dress.-The woollen shirt.The coat.—The tunic.—Hyke or blanket.—Burnoose or cloak.―The girdle. -Wooden bodkin among the Arabs instead of the fibula used among the Romans.-Buskins.—Shoes.-Garment of hair-cloth.- Various habits of eastern females.-The veil―Of different kinds.-Ordinary Aleppo veil.Females wear their hair very long.—Weight of Absalom's hair.—Medicaments for improving the hair.-Yellow locks.-Head-dress of the eastern ladies.-Tinging the hair and eye-brows with powder of lead ore.-Nosejewel.-Ear-rings.-Ankles and wrists adorned with rings.-Bells fastened to these rings.-Ornaments of the Arabian females.-Assyrian ladies elegantly clothed.—Description of an Assyrian lady in full dress.--The silver horn.-How worn by the ladies.

THE dress of oriental nations, to which the inspired writers often allude, has undergone almost no change from the earliest times. Their stuffs were fabricated of various

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materials; but wool was generally used in their finer fabrics; and the hair of goats, camels, and even of horses, was manufactured for coarser purposes, especially for sackcloth, which they wore in time of mourning and distress. Sackcloth of black goat's hair, was manufactured for mournings; the colour and the coarseness of which, being reckoned more suitable to the circumstances of the wearer, than the finer and more valuable texture which the hair of white goats supplied. This is the reason, that a clouded sky is represented in the bold figurative language of Scripture, as covered with sackcloth and blackness, the colour and dress of persons in affliction. In Egypt and Syria, they wore also fine linen, cotton, and byssus, probably fine muslin from India, in Hebrew (p) bouts, the finest cloth known to the ancients. In Canaan, persons of distinction were dressed in fine linen of Egypt; and, according to some authors, in silk, and rich cloth, shaded with the choicest colours, or as the Vulgate calls it, with feathered work, embroidered with gold. The beauty of their clothes consisted in the fineness and colour of the stuffs; and it seems, the colour most in use among the Israelites, as well as among the Greeks and Romans, was white, not imparted and improved by the dyer's art, but the native colour of the wool, being most suited to the nature of their laws, which enjoined so many washings and purifications. The general use of this colour, seems to be recognized by Solomon in his direction: "Let thy garments be always white." But garments in the native colour of the wool,

b

a

a So early as the days of Hesiod, the Greeks considered white as the colour in which the celestials appeared: Men went to heaven in white clothing. Opera et Dies. 1. 198. b Eccl. ix, 8.

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