Textiles have been used for far more than clothing. Across thousands of years of human history, woven fabrics served as armor, currency, sail material, surgical thread, burial wrappings, and powerful symbols of social rank. The oldest confirmed woven garment, a V-neck linen shirt found in an Egyptian tomb, dates to roughly 3482–3102 BC, and textile use almost certainly stretches back further still.
Clothing and Everyday Wear
The most obvious use of textiles, and the oldest one we can confirm, is clothing. That Egyptian linen shirt, known as the Tarkhan Dress, was excavated from a cemetery about 50 kilometers south of Cairo. Radiocarbon testing by the University of Oxford dated it with 95% accuracy to the late fourth millennium BC. The dress shows visible signs of wear, meaning someone actually wore it in daily life rather than having it made purely for burial.
Linen made from flax was the dominant textile in ancient Egypt, while wool dominated in colder climates across Europe and Central Asia. Cotton became a staple in South Asia and eventually spread worldwide. Each of these fibers shaped the daily routines of entire civilizations, from how people farmed to what they traded.
Burial Rites and Religious Ritual
In ancient Egypt, textiles played a central role in death. Linen strips were used extensively in mummification, wrapping the body in layers that were often saturated with embalming balms made from tree resins and essential oils. Researchers analyzing mummy wrappings have identified coatings of pine resin, pistachio resin, and oils possibly derived from juniper. Some of the cloths used as mummy bandages were actually repurposed clothing, fragments of garments given a second life in burial.
Beyond wrapping the dead, Egyptians also produced inscribed and painted linen for ceremonial purposes. Textiles could carry images, text, and decorative beadwork, blurring the line between fabric and art. Similar sacred uses of cloth appear in cultures worldwide, from Andean burial textiles to the silk shrouds of East Asia.
Armor and Military Protection
One of the more surprising historical uses of textiles is battlefield armor. Ancient Greek soldiers wore a type of body armor called a linothorax, made from multiple layers of linen glued together with animal-based adhesive, likely rabbit glue. Experimental archaeologists at a project associated with Johns Hopkins University reconstructed one by laminating 15 layers of hand-processed flax linen into a slab about one centimeter thick.
The results were striking. The finished armor was so tough that researchers could only cut through the laminated slab using an electric saw with a metal-cutting blade. In weapons testing, arrows stuck in the outer layers but failed to penetrate deep enough to reach the body. The reconstructed linothorax weighed about 10 pounds, roughly one-third the weight of a bronze breastplate offering comparable protection. It also molded to the wearer’s body after a couple hours of use, as body heat softened the glue slightly, making it more comfortable than rigid metal armor.
In medieval Europe, soldiers wore a quilted cloth garment called a gambeson, either on its own or beneath metal plate armor. These padded textile layers could absorb the force of blows and provided insulation against the cold of metal pressing against skin.
Sails and Maritime Exploration
Without textiles, the age of global exploration would never have happened. Sails were the engines of maritime travel for millennia, and they were made from woven fabric. Viking-age Scandinavians used wool sailcloth, which researchers at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, have studied through experimental reconstruction. Wool sails were durable and could be treated with animal fat for water resistance.
Linen and hemp sails were also common, and later, cotton became a widespread sail material. The construction varied: some sails were assembled from vertical panels, others reinforced with diagonal bands or colored strips for added strength. Sails were often the single most expensive component of a ship, and maintaining them required constant textile work at sea. Ropes for rigging were made from hemp and other plant fibers, meaning nearly every part of a ship’s propulsion system was textile-based.
Signaling Social Status and Power
What you wore communicated who you were, and for most of history, this wasn’t subtle. Research on the English royal households of Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth of York in the late 1400s shows a rigid hierarchy of fabrics and colors. The type of cloth and its color were deliberately assigned based on rank, from the nobility down to servants and even the groups of impoverished people supported by the household.
Silk, velvet, and finely dyed wool signaled wealth because they were expensive to produce and difficult to obtain. Certain dyes, like the famous Tyrian purple extracted from sea snails, were so costly that they became legally restricted to royalty in some societies. Sumptuary laws across medieval Europe explicitly dictated which social classes could wear which textiles, making fabric a regulated marker of identity. Wearing cloth above your station could result in fines or punishment.
Medicine and Wound Care
Textiles have been used in medicine for as long as medicine has existed. One of the earliest known medical texts, an ancient Egyptian papyrus, advises closing wounds by drawing the edges of a gash together with strips of linen. This is essentially the same principle behind modern adhesive wound closures.
Surgical sutures were also textile-based for thousands of years. Early practitioners used eyed needles made from bone to pass threads of grass, hemp, linen, or pig bristles through wounds. Silk became a standard non-absorbable suture material and remained in surgical use well into modern times. For absorbable sutures, surgeons historically used catgut, made from the intestinal lining of sheep, a material that the body could break down on its own after the wound healed. These natural textile sutures were the standard of care for millennia before synthetic alternatives arrived.
Currency and Trade Goods
In many ancient economies, textiles functioned as money. Bolts of linen in Egypt, rolls of silk along the trade routes connecting China to the Mediterranean, and woven cloth in Mesoamerica all served as units of exchange. Fabric was portable, divisible, universally useful, and labor-intensive to produce, which gave it stable value. In some societies, a specific length or quality of cloth had a fixed worth, making it as reliable as coined metal for completing transactions.
The Silk Road, history’s most famous trade network, was literally named after a textile. Silk moved westward from China while wool, linen, and cotton moved in various directions along the same routes, carrying not just economic value but cultural techniques, dye recipes, and weaving patterns between civilizations that might otherwise never have influenced each other.
Art, Decoration, and Storytelling
Textiles served as a medium for visual art and narrative long before paper was widely available. The Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidered cloth nearly 70 meters long, tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Egyptian linen was painted and inscribed with images and text. Andean cultures encoded information in knotted textile cords called quipu.
Decorative textiles also transformed living spaces. Tapestries insulated cold stone castle walls while displaying scenes of hunting, mythology, or religious devotion. Rugs and carpets served both functional and artistic purposes across Central Asia and the Middle East, with regional weaving patterns becoming signatures of specific communities. In all these cases, textiles carried meaning that went well beyond their material function, preserving stories, beliefs, and identities in woven form.