Ghost in the machine

Twitter Shenanigans 1 and 2

Some more DBZ: That 70's show because eh why not, I do want a Dragon ball sitcom and them trying to live a normal human life

[Dragon Ball]

Piccolo

So in the Egyptology group chat this morning, we were having a discussion on Amenhotep II’s ‘mesh underwear’ that he’s depicted wearing under a sheer top cloth. They’re made of Gazelle leather, and each hole is hand cut with a modesty panel for butthole and structure. This led to some back and forth about examples, like this one:

Soldiers are depicted wearing them too:

And then we came across one with much larger holes cut in the leather:

Which led to a discussion about Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep II being balls out in flexible leather fishnet style underwear….

Sweaty balls? In this pre-capitalist market economy?

pin-up was of course immediately suggested

The clap of his ass cheeks keeps alerting the Hittites…

That’s amazing. How did they do that?? And how did it stay intact for so long that we have actual examples to work from??

a) Egypt’s climate is very good at keeping these things intact because it’s so dry. Organics simply do not rot away as fast or as much.

b) We had a discussion on this, and it’s making lots of cuts, alternating from each other, and then just cutting out the bits in the middle. Like this:

Still very complicated, and since these are single pieces of leather, they can’t make a mistake either.

You wouldn’t even need to cut away parts from the middle tbf, if you make these cuts close enough to each other and then stretch the leather to the side, it should afaik make the diamond pattern. I do have a large piece of leather here to potentially try it, but not the right tools so I owe you guys that bit of experimental archaeology.

You can see it in the closeup of one of the loin cloths Lottie posted, just to the right underneath the accession number:

Those are alternating cuts set very close together.

Also as we were chatting about it, we figured it may be entirely possible for the Egyptians to have had some sort of die cutter or mold to make this process easier. But as none of us have been aware of this leather loin cloth type before this morning, we’ve not been able to do the research to say for certain if we’ve found a tool like that yet!

made me think of this thing that i have at home

did they use tools like that or was it all made by hand? I know nothing about ancient egypt. I just wonder if it wouldn’t be too tedious to do smth like that by hand ‘just for some underwear’ but then again i am a total layman in this, never even had any interest in ancient egypt so i’ve got no clue about the value of these items at the time, nor do i have any other info on ancient egyptian leatherwork or clothes in general. But i can imagine a tool like this being just really neat.

They most likely made all the incisions by hand using a sharp implement like a knife made from copper or bone. There’s another example from the Hierokonpolis C-Group tombs of Nubians who arrived in Egypt during the First Intermediate Period (the part between the Old and Middle Kingdoms):

This one is done by small rectangles all 4mm apart, which were slashed in probably by a small knife. The loincloth above is a very early extant example of this type of leatherwork that didn’t really take off until the New Kingdom, but we know they imported this sort of leatherwork technique from both the Nubians and the Asiatic civilisations they came into contact with. This one in particular belonged to a Nubian woman who was a dancer in her younger days, so would wear this….and basically nothing else….to dance in. Here’s a New Kingdom example of a dancer wearing a similar mesh loincloth:

If you want to read more about Leatherwork in Ancient Egypt, you can read this 2008 article by André J. Veldmeijer on the subject, and if you want to know more about the Nubian Dancer/her loincloth/her tattoos, you can read this article on Hierokonpolis Online, which is run by the team who excavates the site.

Please reblog this version if you’re looking for ‘how was this done?’ because tumblr hid it in the notes due to the fact I provided external linked sources to more info.

I’d like to add, with the caveat that I’m not a professional, that having worked leather the given explanation for how these garments are made seems completely plausible to me. I’m tempted to try a bit of experimental archaeology but frankly I don’t have the time to re-create all the relevant elements.

Let me go into a bit more detail and some speculation as to How I Would Do It.

Now, I have never dealt with oil-cured gazelle skin. Oil-curing is virtually unknown in modern times, as it is inferior to modern tanning in pretty much every way - though I bet it’s very kind to the skin, which is would be desirable for such a garment. And gazelle skin is… well, it wouldn’t be impossible to get, but it’s not something a North American leatherworker handles very often. I’d like to mention here that oil-cured gazelle skin is - as the linked paper above mentions, technically not leather, but I will be referring to it as such hereafter for simplicity and as the closest modern analogue.

My immediate guess was that the leather used would be something like deerskin - soft, stretchy, not very strong. But on a bit more thought I think that’s not the case at all. To get a garment as depicted, I think the material would be rather more like goatskin: thin, strong, moderately soft, not very stretchy. Gloving leather, in modern terms. That’s what I’d try first, at any rate.

Now, it’s obscure to me as to why they chose this kind of leather for their undergarments when they clearly had access to cotton and linen, materials that other cultures preferred for such uses. I can guess that it might have been due to economy - leather could have been cheaper than woven cloth; it may have been a perceived or real matter of hygiene, or durability. It could have simply been a cultural preference: bear in mind that the pre-Pharonic people of the region were once referred to as Penistaschen Leute (penis-sheath people) based on the Eastern Desert petroglyphs from that period, and they may have retained a cultural preference to protect their genitals with animal skins even after woven cloth became available.

Whatever the reason, at some point they transitioned from the pre-Pahronic loincloths to a more structured, closer-fitting garment and doubtless ran into the inherent flaws with using leather: that it does not breath, and it does not stretch enough for such a high movement part of the body. Potentially we can see transitional artifacts or depictions which would shed light on how this garment evolved.

Now, from a leathering perspective both issues can be solved in the same way: with cutouts. My personal suspicion is that the cutouts were initially for ventilation as larger cutouts (or, potentially, starting with a loose loincloth and adding ties to keep it from moving so freely). Over time they adopted much smaller but more numerous cutouts which enabled a closer-fitting garment which nonetheless was comfortable and did not restrict freedom of movement. Again, speculatively transitional artifacts or depictions might exist - but it’s entirely possible that the leap from “loincloth” to “leather fishnet” was accomplished by a single artisan and then rapidly popularized.

As to the construction of the garment, I wholly agree that there was no need for a specialized tool. Ancient Egyptian smiths were entirely capable of making a full set of leathering tools, most of which would be familiar today. I am sure I’ve seen copper head knives much as are still in use (granted modern examples are steel). This versatile tool would serve quite well for making exactly the kind of cuts we see in these garments. An Ancient Egyptian leatherer, then, likely just reached for their most familiar tool.

Now if I were to make one of these garments, there are two other tools I’d need: a straight-edge and a cutting board. A more skilled leatherer might be able to make the cuts freehand, but a skilled leather would also recognize the merits of not doing things the hard way for no reason. If my speculative method is correct, I suspect we would find a straight tool, likely with a number of evenly-spaced marks, as a guide for making the holes. As for the cutting board, this should be reasonably obvious, that making even cuts requires a solid surface but one soft enough to not ruin the cutting blade. If a cutting board had been used for this purpose, I’d expect to find lines of nicks in the board. However, cutting boards are necessarily consumable resources - they will be disposed of after they are no longer usable. Also, given the relative scarcity of wood in Ancient Egypt they may have used other, more degradable materials for their cutting boards.

I think specialized tools are unlikely. Such tools might make sense for a larger scale mass production operation: we can envision a factory which made nothing but undergarments. However, to my knowledge in Ancient Egypt most finished goods of this nature were made locally and custom-ordered. There was not an Ancient Egyptian “Fruit of the Loom”; one simply went to the local leatherer and paid them to make a garment. On that scale, specialized tools would actually slow down the process for a number of reasons, and I doubt any leatherworker would feel the need to get a custom tool for something they could easily do by hand.

Now, at this point I feel I should emphasize again that I am not a professional Egyptologist, and much of what I have said is speculative. While I have made a few predictions which would either prove or disprove my speculation, I have not checked to see if that evidence exists. Should a professional feel that this post is misinforming regarding Ancient Egypt I will delete it.

No, this is a really good response! The only thing I can add, from an Egyptological perspective, is that they did have linen loincloths it’s just that linen, depending on quality, was expensive and time consuming to make. This meant that leatherwork was quicker and easier, especially on a mass production scale needed for something like the Egyptian army. Linen was also seen as ‘sunday best’ so was reserved for special occasions, though this probably didn’t extend to underwear. Kha and Merrit’s tomb has numerous linen loin cloths, and so does the tomb of Tutankhamun. I think these leatherwork loincloths were used in conjunction with the linen ones, so the linen would be underneath the leather, but I’ve no idea what the reason for this is really. Amenhotep II was drawn in just the fishnet loincloth for a bit of fun, but you can see the images of the soldiers above seem to have white underneath the leather. However, this could equally be because the paint for the leather and skin colour is essentially the same, so they left it white for a sharper contrast (something they do a lot).

now for the ultimate test. go to this website. set it to randomly generate ONE pokemon. all generations. all types. whatever it generates? thats you as a pokemon forever. what you get is what you get. NO RE ROLLING. now. who are you? i got goomy :^)

Very silly story idea in which Aizawa is fostering kittens and All Might is so smitten with them that he talks his way into becoming a foster co-parent. Hilarity ensues.

next day in Heroics class

Official artwork for the new starter pokemon in Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet 

Names for the new starter Pokémon:

- Sprigatito, the Grass Cat Pokémon

- Fuecoco, the Fire Croc Pokémon

- Quaxly, the Duckling Pokémon

Leaked footage from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

I spent 7 hours on this Community meme, please laugh.

happy halloween!! i don’t have anything special to offer so have this haha lol