The Phaistos helmet reconstruction - complete

There you have it folks, my reconstruction of a 16th century BCE Minoan helmet.

Here it is with the original Phaistos helmet for comparison

My objective was to make a helmet that is as close as possible to what the Minoans actually used, based on what we know about helmets in the bronze age.  How historically accurate is my reconstruction?  Overall this was quite a successful project and the final product does successfully recreate the Phaistos helmet.  Where I've had to make assumptions, I'm fairly confident that they are plausible and reasonable.    As far as possible I've used materials and technique that were available to the Minoans, with the exception of three little cheats: metal components made out of modern ferrous alloy, modern dyes for the felt, and modern steel tools.  In this blog post I'll talk about some of the decisions I made and why I made them.

Because these helmets were made from perishable materials there are no surviving examples.  There are depictions of beehive helmets in Minoan and Mycenaean art, but these are small, often fairly stylized, and can be interpreted in a number of different ways.

Some of the most detailed depictions of beehive helmets in ancient art show boars' tusk helmets of the kind Homer described.  These sculptures show helmets that were constructed around a framework of leather strips, and I've constructed mine the same way.  The difference is that instead of boars' tusks my helmet has an outer shell of leather plates.

From the front

From the side

From the inside.  The felt lining is what Homer called a πίλός (pilos).

Because of the lack of direct archaeological evidence I've had to make some assumptions, and to some extent this project has been about testing those assumptions.  Using felt to cover the joins in the outer layer of the helmet was an assumption based on the fact that it's well suited to the task, and we know that felt was used to line helmets.   While it would have been possible to use leather I think the felt did a better job and was easier to work with, so that assumption worked fairly well.  The felt lining inside the helmet makes it more comfortable to wear, but on the outside it's mainly decorative.  It's there to cover the join lines between the leather plates.

My decision to make the outer shell of the helmet in four parts was also an assumption.   I don't know if the Minoans would have had a way to make the outside of a helmet in one piece, but that wasn't possible with the leather I used.

The fact that Aegean beehive helmets were usually made from perishable materials is fairly conclusively established*, but exactly what materials were used and how they were used is less clear.  Based on archaeological finds of metal reinforcement discs we know that this style of helmet was made from either leather or some type of textile with metal discs attached to it to enhance its protective qualities.   Leather is a reasonable guess, but it's also possible these helmets could have been made from linen.  Probably many layers of linen glued together much like a linothorax.   Some bronze age images show helmets with horizontal ridges that I think may perhaps represent thick rolls of glued linen.  In the future I'd like to try making a linen helmet to see how it works out.

From the top you can see the concentric leather rings that make up the outside of the helmet.

What kind of protection would this helmet offer?  

I have to admit that after spending between 20 and 30 hours making this thing I don’t particularly want to take it down the firing range and shoot at it.  However, it would be easy enough to make a test patch and I can already make some observations about the helmet’s protective qualities.

At its thinnest point, the helmet is 20mm thick.  This includes two layers of 5mm armour leather plus two layers of wool felt.  At its crown the helmet is a good two inches thick, with many layers of leather strips.  It weighs 1.4 kilograms, which is equivalent to a lightweight motorcycle helmet.

I’m inclined to think the primary purpose of a helmet like this was to prevent blunt force trauma.  It’s made from thick layers of flexible materials that can absorb the kinetic energy of an impact, and it offers as much protection as possible to the crown of the head.  The thick leather reinforced with metal studs would be relatively difficult to penetrate with a sword or arrow, but the construction as a whole seems designed to absorb the kinetic energy of an impact rather than to provide the kind of solid barrier that plate armour does. In this respect it's a lot like a linothorax.

Would I be happy to let someone hit me over the head while wearing this helmet?  Yes.  Yes I would.



*  Helmets made entirely out of metal did exist in the bronze age, but were unusual.  Even the famous Dendra Panoply did not come with a metal helmet.  Its owner apparently preferred a boars' tusk helmet.

Minoan/Mycenaean helmet pattern

My proposed reconstruction of the Phaistos helmet has two layers of leather: an inner layer that creates the distinctive conical shape, and an outer layer of horizontal bands that will be sewn together.  I'm putting the pattern on the net here in case anyone wants to use it.

This pattern is for the internal layer of the helmet; I'll talk about the outer layer in a future post, but today we're going to concentrate on the helmet's internal construction.  While the exterior design of bronze age Aegean helmets varied considerably, the internal construction seems not to have changed very much.  My helmet is based on a  Minoan relief from the 16th century BCE, but this pattern would work equally well for many of the late Mycenaean designs or for the classic boar's tusk model.  Enjoy!

The neck and cheek guards are of course optional; many bronze age helmets didn't have them.

This pattern makes a helmet whose circumference is 600 mm (24").  It needs to be slightly too big for your head because it will have a felt cap (πιλος) inside it.  If you use this pattern you'll have to check that the dimensions work for your head, but to some extent it's a one-size-fits-most deal.  If it's a bit loose all you have to do is add another layer of felt inside it. Linear B inventories of armour from Knossos and Pylos include helmets, which makes me wonder if they were sometimes mass produced.

The pattern piece is sewn together at the center front with linen thread and the top has been cut into strips, which are tied together in a bundle to give it the conical beehive shape.  This process is more difficult than you might think.  Expect to spend a lot of time fiddling with the top knot to make it work.

If you use very thick leather you'll find, as I did, that it's impossible to tie all the strips together at the top.  I tied only some of my strips into the top knot, and left the others free on the inside of the helmet.  I don't think this affects the protective qualities of the helmet, especially since this is only the internal layer, but it's interesting because when Homer describes Odysseus' helmet he says the leather strips at the top are "interwoven".  I wonder if this is what he meant?

My helmet is made of 5 mm thick veg-tanned armour leather.  Here in NZ it can be bought from Lapco and as far as leather goes it is not too expensive.  Ideally you do want this kind of leather, but if you can't get it or can't afford it you may be able to use an old leather jacket. Part of the reason you need thick, stiff leather is that the top part of the helmet has to keep its shape on its own without any other support.  It is literally strips of leather tied together.

You may be wondering why the seam is at the front instead of the back, which is the more intuitively obvious place.  That's because this helmet has a neck guard at the back.  Putting the seam up the center back would screw up the neck guard, and the seam will be covered by another layer of leather, plus metal reinforcing discs, so it should be safe enough.

Heirlooms and Heritage

August's HSM challenge is Heirlooms and Heritage.   Since I'm mostly interested in very early periods, I've chosen to focus on the heritage side of the coin and celebrate my Danish ancestors by recreating the belt from Borum Eshøj.  There are other similar belts from Egtved and Trindhøj, so it's not unreasonable to think my ancestors in Sjæland might have worn belts like these.

The belt is a warp faced tabby, with the warp ends finished off as decorative tassels.  Structurally it's quite simple, but it uses different coloured wools spun in different ways for decoration.  This kind of decoration is typical of Scandinavian Bronze Age textiles.  They don't seem to have used dyes, but sheep's wool does naturally come in a range of colours and this colour variation was used to create multi-coloured fabric.  Shadow stripes made from a combination of S spun and Z spun yarns were also popular, and some items were embroidered.  In short, textile decoration in Scandinavia at this time focused on texture and subtle colour variations, rather than the bright colours that were popular in the Aegean.

My reproduction belt.

The shadow stripe I tried to make didn't come out as well as I hoped.  It is there, but you have to look hard to see it. I think the primary reason is that the S spun yarn I used was very loosely spun, so once it is woven you can't easily see the direction of the spinning.  The shadow stripe is easier to see in the middle section of yarn, which is the yarn I spun myself and is spun a lot more tightly, but the stripe doesn't come through so well with the loosely spun commercial yarn.

The yellow line shows the direction of the shadow stripe.  You can see it when you know what you're looking for, but it isn't very clear.

I had a problem with finishing off the ends too.  I couldn't quite figure out from photos how the original was done, and had to improvise a bit.  I wouldn't say the result is bad - it works and I like the way it looks, but it's not a good reproduction of the original.  That may not be too much of a problem because all the Bronze Age Scandinavian belts that have survived are a bit different in terms of design and construction.   Still, it annoys me.

On the whole though I'm happy with my belt.  It looks nice, it was fun to make, and it's a fairly good representation of some of the decorative techniques used in Bronze Age Denmark.


The Challenge: Heirlooms and Heritage.

Fabric: The belt contains something like 120 meters of woolen yarn in two slightly different colours.  The original Borum Eshøj belt was made with undyed wool, but a lighter coloured fleece was used for the middle section of the warp.

Pattern: N/A.  It's a simple warp faced tabby so doesn't require a pattern.

Year: Around 1,350 BCE.

Notions: N/A.

How historically accurate is it?  I think maybe 80% as a reproduction of the Borum Eshøj belt.  As a generic Bronze Age Scandinavian belt it may be a little more accurate, since they weren't all exactly the same.

Hours to complete: About 18, including spinning.

First worn:  Not yet.

Total cost:  $23 for two balls of wool.

Loom setup for the Borum Eshøj project

You know what's great about warp-weighted looms?  You don't need any equipment at all.  You just need a couple of sticks and something to weight the ends with.

I've now finished setting up the loom for my Bronze Age belt.  As I said previously, I re-spun some of the warp threads to get a combination of S-spun and Z-spun threads.  Now they're all ready to go.  Today,  we're going to look at a quick and easy way to make loom weights, and how you can produce a piece of weaving that is longer than the height of your loom.

Warp weighted loom all ready to go.

The belt from Borum Eshøj is a warp-faced tabby weave, which I find is fairly easy to make on a warp weighted loom.   In general, however,  a warp weighted loom is trickier to work with than something like a table loom.  This project is not too bad because it's a narrow band and uses sturdy yarn, but it does require a certain level of manual dexterity.

As you can see, the warp threads are arranged in groups, and each group is attached to its own weight.  There's a group of homespun threads in the center, and a group of commercially manufactured threads either side.

In Ancient Textiles: Production, Crafts and Society, Marie-Louise Nosch noted that the Borum Eshøj belt's warp threads are divided into groups of 8 like rune staves (the runic alphabet is made up of groups of eight letters, called staves), and she wonders if this was intended to have magical significance.   In Viking Age Scandinavia the number eight did have magical or supernatural connotations.  It occurs in Viking magic inscriptions relatively regularly, and there are also references in the sagas to textiles with magical properties woven into them.  It's likely that number magic was one way of doing this.  This is an interesting idea, but the belt from Borum Eshøj predates the earliest known runic inscriptions by some 1500 years so I don't know how likely it is.  I guess it's possible.  Stephen Flowers*, who is a leading authority on Viking runic magic, believes that the Vikings' magic practices belong to a very old tradition that was in place well before the runic alphabet (and that, esteemed readers, is a little preview of my October project).

Anyway, I did the warp in groups of 8 like the original, because why not?

Let's talk about loom weights.  Loom weights provide tension for the warp threads while you're weaving, and if the warp is made of wool it will stretch slightly.  This is good, it helps keep your weaving nice and tight.  Different yarns need different weights, and there is a bit of trial and error involved in figuring out how much weight you need.  I find commercial yarns intended for knitting are very stretchy and need heavier weights.  The yarns that I spun are spun more tightly and less inclined to stretch, so a lighter weight is fine.  The homespun threads are the ones in the middle, and they only need a 150 gram weight.  A 250 gram coffee mug worked well for the commercial yarn, but I didn't want my coffee mugs bashing together and chipping, so I've used dried lentils weighed out into plastic bags.  Feel free to use other things besides lentils, the sky's the limit here.  Anything that can be conveniently weighed out into small bags will get the job done.

In the ancient world loom weights were made of clay or stone because these were cheap and readily available.   Today,  dried lentils (or rice, or corn kernels) are cheap and readily available, and the benefit of using them is that you can adjust the amount of weight you use very easily and precisely.

Now that we've covered off loom weights, what happens if the piece of cloth you want to make is longer than your loom is tall?  For reasons that should be fairly obvious,  the height of a warp weighted loom is limited by the height of the weaver.  It's still possible to make a longer piece of cloth on the loom, if you roll it up around a bar at the top.  Take a look at this picture of Penelope weaving her tapestry:

Image found here.

You can see that she has a big roll of finished cloth rolled up around the beam at the top of her loom.

This next photo shows how I dealt with the warp ends.  You can see I've tied a knot in the bundle of warp threads, part way down their length.  The weight hangs from this knot.  When I want to weave the rest of the warp, I'll untie the knots, wrap the belt around the header bar to pull it up, and reattach the weight further down the warp threads.  I can repeat this process as many times as I need to, until I reach the end of the warp.

*For everything you ever wanted to know about runes and the magical properties Vikings ascribed to them, read Stephen Flowers' doctoral dissertation Runes and Magic.  

What my Bronze Age ancestors wore

The next HSM challenge theme is Heirlooms and Heritage.  I've approached this challenge by looking at the types of garments my Bronze Age ancestors wore.  Up to 1875, my father's family* lived in Denmark.  Dad's family came from Møn, where they were farmers as far back as there are Danish census records available.  I can't find any records of my ancestors prior to the 17th century, but Møn has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic.  It has a lot of funerary monuments from the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age and although people were highly mobile at that time, it makes sense to think dad's ancestors were in around that general area.

I have a couple of bronze items on my to-do list, but didn't want to make them for this challenge because I have no way of knowing what socio-economic status my ancestors had.  I settled on reconstructing the Borum Eshøj belt.   Belts are a utilitarian item that everybody uses, regardless of their location or social status, and the belt from Borum Eshøj is a very interesting textile.  It's not a unique item - the Egtved Girl had a similar belt, as did the man from Trindhøj - so while I'll never know for sure if my ancestors wore belts like these it does seem reasonably plausible.

Photo found here.

The first question was what wool to use.  New Zealand produces lots of lovely wool, but over the centuries selective breeding has resulted in sheep whose wool is very different to the kind of wool used in Bronze Age Denmark.  Back then, sheep had a double coat consisting of longer, waterproof guard hairs and shorter, fluffier insulating hairs.  The long hairs made stronger yarn, but the shorter hairs made warmer woollier yarn.  So I went looking to see if Bronze Age type sheep were still around, and I found that they are, more or less.  Bronze Age European wool was a lot like Soay wool.  Soay sheep are a primitive breed which retain the characteristics of their Bronze Age ancestors.  However, I couldn't find a source of suitable Soay wool.  Faroese sheep would also be a possibility, but all the Faroese wool I found online was blended with Merino and other things.  If I want a Merino blend I can save myself some money and get a perfectly nice local one, which is what I ended up doing.

I bought fairly chunky yarn in natural fleece colours, so they would look as much like the original as possible.  Borum Eshøj textiles were not dyed and are quite coarse with 3 - 5 threads per cm, but this does not mean they were unsophisticated. The Borum Eshøj belt encorporates both S and Z spun yarn, to create a zig-zag effect in the weave.  The technical term is a shadow stripe, and it was a popular way to decorate textiles in Bronze Age Europe (see NESAT X).  All my wool is commercially made S spun yarn, but the idea of making the belt without that cool shadow stripe really irritated me.

Did you know that if you're careful, you can pick apart commercially produced yarn and re-spin it so that it is Z spun?  I re-spun some of my wool into Z yarn, because apparently I don't know what's good for me.

On the left S spun commercial yarn, on the right my new Z spun yarn.

*I don't know as much about my ancestry on my mother's side.  Given that mum's family is from England, it's a good bet some of her Bronze Age ancestors lived in Denmark too.

A 13,000 year old fashion statement

I finished the Natufian headband, and have had an opportunity to take photos.  Ornaments made from shells were used in the palaeolithic Levant from at least 92,000 years BP and were a characteristic feature of Natufian culture, but we don't know exactly what they signified.  A headband like this one might have carried information about the wearer's social status, or the shells might have functioned as a type of currency.

Fortunately we do know what the headband looked like, so I've been able to reconstruct it.

Since I don't look even remotely Middle Eastern, you will have to use your imagination a bit.

Although this is a reconstruction of a palaeolithic accessory, I think there's something surprisingly modern about it.  It makes me look like a Californian hippy, and I can easily picture a Californian hippy wearing it*.

This is where the two ends of the headband join up.

I think the way I've joined the thread ends looks quite attractive, but I have no idea how historically accurate it is.  I've knotted the warp ends together and pushed them back through the beads to make them tidy, which seems like a logical thing to do, but the original fibers have rotted away so there's no evidence of how it was really done.

The Challenge: Accessorize.

Fabric: 57cm strip of weft twined fabric, with rows of beads strung on the warp threads.

Pattern: N/A.  I did consult diagrams of surviving Natufian textiles, but I don't think that really counts as a pattern.

Year: 14,000 to 13,000 BP (or 12,000 to 11,000 BCE).

Notions: Dentalium shell beads.

How historically accurate is it?  This piece is about as accurate as it's possible to get when reconstructing anything from this time period.  Any reconstruction of an item from so long ago is necessarily conjectural, because no complete items survive and we just don't know how they were made.  As I discussed in my last post, we're lucky even to know what this headband looked like.  However, I have been careful to use materials available to the Natufians, and to make the textile using techniques attested in the archeological record.

Hours to complete: 6 hours.  Warp twined textiles take a long time to make, especially when the process also involves sorting dentalium shells into groups of roughly equal length and threading them onto the warp threads.

First worn:  For photos.

Total cost:  I can't remember how much the dentalium shells cost, but I'd guess it was around $15 to $20.  The thread just came off my big spool of linen.


*Why California?  Because it is extremely cold here right now and I am daydreaming about a holiday in the Napa Valley.

Deciphering a palaeolithic textile

For  HSM challenge 7 I'm reconstructing a headband found at El Wad in what is now Israel.  The headband was buried with its owner, who came from the Natufian culture and lived in the El Wad area during the palaeolithic.  In this blog post I'll talk about the process I'm using to reconstruct the headband, and why I think it's likely the original headband was made this way.

The headband was decorated with rows of beads made from dentalium shells.  Dentalium shell beads are a characteristic feature of the Natufian culture, and are very common in Natufian burials and settlement sites.  In some cases it's impossible to tell how the Natufians used their shells.  It's not always clear whether the shells were made into jewelry or attached to people's clothes, but we have a good idea about what this particular headband looked like because a lot of the shell beads are still in place, stuck to the owner's skull:

Image found here.

It makes sense to assume the shells were attached to some type of fabric band, but this has rotted away so a bit of detective work is necessary to determine what type of fabric it might have been, and how the shells might have been attached.

The El Wad burials have been dated between 14,000 and 13,000 years BP (remember, radiocarbon dating gives dates as BP or "before present", which means before 1 January 1950).  At this time, the Natufians hadn't yet discovered weaving as we know it today.  Woven textiles don't start to appear until later in the neolithic around 6000 BCE.  Instead, they made twined linen textiles like this:

Image from C. Giner, 2012, Textiles from the Pre-pottery Neolithic Site of Tell Halula (Euphrates Valley, Syria), available here.

I've made a swatch of twined cloth based on Natufian examples before, which I blogged about here.  It's easy enough to make, just very time consuming.  Woven cloth is much quicker to manufacture, which is why twined cloth gradually fell out of favour after weaving was invented.

Attaching the shells to this fabric could have been done in a couple of different ways. They could either have been sewn onto the fabric, or they could have been threaded directly onto the warp threads of the fabric.  As I discussed in my last post, it looks to me as though the shells were threaded directly onto the warp threads of the fabric, with twined weft threads in between each row of shells.  The original has a distinct gap between each row of shells, and the shells sit in very straight, even lines which suggests to me they were woven into the cloth.  The beads' holes all line up exactly.

This photo shows how I've threaded dentalium shells onto my warp threads, and then twined weft threads between each row of shells.   I haven't used a loom for this process, because I found I don't really need to.  The shells tend to keep the warp threads where they need to be, and once the weft threads are in place the fabric is pretty sturdy.  One advantage of twined cloth is that it doesn't fray or unravel.

I can't say for sure if this is how the original was constructed, but this method does produce a headband that looks like the original, and is consistent with what we know about Natufian textile manufacture.  The thread is linen, which seems to be what the Natufians used to make their textiles.  The surviving scraps of fabric are linen, so I think it's reasonable to assume the El Wad headband was made using linen thread.  This thread isn't processed and spun by hand the authentic palaeolithic way, of course, but you can't have everything.

Here's another photo of the partly completed headband:

As you can see, my reconstruction has neat rows of shells with a small gap between each row, just like the original.  The weft thread ends get tucked into the shells and trimmed, and once the headband reaches the right length I'll knot the warp ends together to form a circle.

Prehistoric fashion

Time to chase away the winter blues with something from a nice hot country!  This headband belonged to an individual from the Natufian culture, which thrived between 13,000 BCE and 11,000 BCE in what is now the Levant.

Image found here.

The El Wad headband is made of dentalium shells, and they were obviously strung in rows using fibre that has since rotted away.  The shells themselves are stuck to the skull with some sort of concretion, and it looks as though there were more shells that didn't get stuck to the skull and have fallen away.

Natufians seem to have liked dentalium shells, and they often buried their dead with dentalium jewelry.  This paper gives some interesting insights into the variety of personal adornment the Natufians used, and speculates to some degree about how the items might have been constructed.

The El Wad headband is Early Natufian, meaning that it predates the invention of weaving (see Elizabeth Barber's Prehistoric Textiles, 1991).  I suspect it was most likely made with twined linen thread, much like the textiles being made at that time.  So far I haven't had a lot of luck finding out how the headband was made (surely there must be some pseudomorphs in all that concretion?), but looking at it I can see we have parallel rows of dentalium shells, with a bit of a gap between each row.  To me that suggests the shells were strung on warp threads, with a pair of weft threads twined around the warps between each row of shells.  This would keep the shells in place, and would be consistent with surviving Natufian textiles.

Supplementary warp band

For HSF Challenge 10 I made a woven band based on a fresco from Tyrins, and it damn near killed me.  So naturally I'm doing another one for Challenge 21: Re-do.  But this time it will be different, because I've chosen a simpler design and a different construction method.  Last time I used supplementary weft.  This time it's supplementary warp and in only two colours.

What made my last attempt at Bronze Age band weaving so particularly hellish was that I had to juggle five colours of supplementary yarn.  Here, however, I only have one.  I learned that lesson.

When I made the Tyrins band a couple of people on the Historical Sew Fortnightly Facebook group asked if I took photos of the construction process, but unfortunately I didn't have this blog at the time and hadn't taken any pictures.  Well folks, prepare to laugh yourselves silly as I show you the dodgiest warp weighted loom set up you will ever see.

This loom has everything.  Cardboard tubes I fished out of the recycling bag, parts of a rigid heddle loom (the rigid heddle may or may not be period), teacups used as weights, a chair back, and of course lots of string.

The skein of red wool hanging over the chair back is the supplementary warp, which will create the design on the finished cloth.  In this next photo, the supplementary warp is woven into the fabric.  Supplementary warp is the most likely method for making the decorative bands that adorned Minoan and Mycenaean clothes, although based on my experience with the Tyrins band I'm pretty sure that design couldn't be done just with supplementary warp.  Because it has thin horizontal lines it would need supplementary wefts as well.  I'm not game to find out.

The blue and red look nicer together than I thought they would.

This band is based on examples from Knossos and Mycenae.  It's easy to make, and the pattern is even reversible.  I think of it as a fishing net pattern, though I have no idea if that's what it was supposed to represent.

Warp weighted looms are a fairly complicated concept, but as I've demonstrated they're extremely simple to make.  The Greek term is a histon, and the looms used in the Bronze Age were probably just like the ones pictured on later Greek vases.  My loom obviously uses modern materials, but it works in just the same way as an ancient loom and it makes the same type of cloth.

A late entry

This is the kind of project you do when you're avoiding something else - in this case setting sleeves.  I hate setting sleeves, especially those two-part 19th century jobs where the sleeve head is never the same shape as the armhole.  So instead of spending at most half an hour setting sleeves, I spent four hours making a piece of Neolithic linen textile.

I'm entering this one for HSF Challenge 13: Under $10, which I didn't manage to make anything for at the time.  Of course, Challenge 13 was due in July, but better late than never, right?  I did actually start a piece of twined cloth for Challenge 13, but the timing didn't work out.

Fragments of textile like this were found at Nahal Hemar in Israel, in 1983.  They date from the Neolithic, before the invention of pottery, and they are not woven the way cloth is woven today.  Instead, the linen warp and weft threads are twined together; the people who made these 8500-year-old textiles had not yet invented weaving as we know it today.  However, there was nothing coarse or primitive about the Nahal Hemar textiles.  This tiny scrap of fabric is only 5.5 by 7.5 cm.

Scrap of fabric from Nahal Hemar.  Picture found here.

In Prehistoric Textiles, Elizabeth Barber has a section on the Nahal Hemar textiles and diagrams showing how they were made.  The weft threads are twisted around each individual warp thread, and the result is a sturdy, net-like fabric.  I've made the selvage by wrapping the warp ends in thread, which seems to have been how the Nahal Hemar pieces were finished.

Here is my piece in close up:

The Challenge: Under $10.

Fabric: It is fabric.

Pattern: N/A.

Year: Around 6500 BCE.

Notions: None.

How historically accurate is it?  The technique is fine, and the original Nahar Hemal textiles are made of linen.  While my fabric is not as fine as the example I included in this post, I think it's within the general ballpark in terms of thread diameter.  So maybe 9/10.

Hours to complete: About 4.

First worn: N/A.

Total cost: Virtually none.  I don't remember how much I originally paid for the big spool of linen warp I used to make the piece, but the few meters of linen would cost only a few cents.