Iranica Antiqua, vol. XXXII, 1997 WOMEN’S ROBING IN THE SASANIAN ERA BY Bernard GOLDMAN This brief description is intended as an introduction to women’s dress in Sasanian times with comparanda that helps to place the Iranian styles within the general history of late antique dress in Western Asia. Unfortu- nately, the task is self-limiting, bringing to mind the platonic metaphor of dancing shadows on the cave wall. The habiliment of early Iranian women, like all other early Asian dress, has not survived except as a few bits and pieces of woven stuff1. Our knowledge, then, must derive from those shadowy costumes cast on a few rock reliefs, on some luxury table- ware, glyptics and coin types, and on less than a handful of painting and mosaic fragments. The fragility of this type of evidence accounts no doubt for the scant attention Sasanian costuming has received and, when it is remarked, too often the tendency is to accept these shadows as if they were the substance2. A further complication in any discussion results from the relatively small numbers of pictured women in the several art media, and most of these examples are not easily controlled as to date or place of origin. 1 For preserved Sasanian textiles, figural designs, patterns, Goldman 1993, n. 2; for textile patterns related to or derived from the Sasanian, von Falke 1951; Ierusalimskaia 1972, 11, 14. 2 Several factors pertain in discussing pictured dress and its usefulness in dating: a particular type of dress may assume a traditional role and be worn, copied, or portrayed long after it had dropped out of fashion; an outmoded style may enjoy a revival; official and religious portraits may be clothed in traditional forms that are not limited to any one period; a style may come into fashion later and persist longer in one region than in another; distinctive style details of different periods may overlap and equitably coexist for extended periods. In addition, due account must be taken of the pictorial conventions utilized at any particular time and place, of the local taste of the artists and the market for which they are producing, of the idiosyncratic drawing mannerisms of the silversmith or seal cutter, and of the problems inherent in planographic presentation of three-dimen- sional figures. For an instructive example, see Kromann 1988 on distinguishing between the types of romanized dress represented in Kushan coinage and that contemporaneously worn. 234 B. GOLDMAN Because we have so few large works of art that portray Sasanian women, we are forced to be dependent mainly upon the small crafts, the metalwork and glyptics. But these are also the most illusive as to date and place. The coins with female portraits — both sacred and lay — can be dated with reasonable assurance. Otherwise, the vast majority of artefacts is best considered in the broadest of terms, as from either the earlier or later centuries of Sasanian rule and with some pieces recognized as reflections of Sasanian work that persisted for a lengthy period of time after the fall of the dynasty. And, of course, there remains the ever-discouraging adum- bration of the healthy market in Sasanian fakes, some identified in the literature, others questioned privately rather than in print. If we had a sequence of identifiable portraits of Sasanian women comparable, say, to that which Classical art offers of Roman matrons, the coiffures could be ordered into a fairly reliable index for dating otherwise anonymous works. But the paucity of named women in Sasanian art denies us this useful tool for dating3. I have made no deliberate attempt in the descriptions of the costume types to confirm or to shed any new light on the date, provenance, or authen- ticity of the works cited; that important task is beyond my present purpose. Instead, I have used the dates usually ascribed to the various works in Sasan- ian studies, tacitly considering as authentic any and all works not questioned in published accounts of which I am aware4. Although the evidence for reconstructing women’s fashions during the four centuries of Sasanian rule is meager at best, it is more forthcoming than that from the earlier Achaemenid period when both human and supernal subject matter of the arts and crafts is almost exclusively male. The Macedonian intervention in Asian affairs that followed Alexander’s stunning defeat of the Persians and the later Roman intrusion into Asia must be responsible for the more substantial representation of women and, thus, how they clothed themselves in the centuries of Parthian and 3 For dating Roman hair styles, Thompson 1988, and note 27 below. 4 For the problems attendant upon dating Sasanian monuments and crafts, Harper in CHI 3(2), 1121-26; on dating seals, Göbl 1973, 25-27. The greater number of female portraits appear on seals, the majority of which date from the end of the Sasan- ian period, Frye 1970, 79. For regnal years, I follow Frye 1984. Here I have severely limited the bibliographical references to the monuments from which the costuming is gathered; full coverage is easily available in Vanden Berghe/De Wulf/Haerinck 1979-1981. WOMEN’S ROBING IN THE SASANIAN ERA 235 Sasanian political ascendency. Scholarship in the past few decades has offered an alternate perspective to the earlier vision of a unitary Parthian art. Today the emphasis is less on a single dominant Parthian art style than on the art works which were produced during the long Parthian era as representative of different regional styles that share some basic affinities — the Syrian, Palmyrean, Hatrean, Arab, Babylonian, etc. This approach may be compared to that of the historians in Italian early Renaissance art who organize the period in terms of related, but clearly to be differentiated, schools — Roman, Florentine, Sienese, Venetian, Umbrian, etc. Whether Sasanian art is conceptually a unified body of material or should be divided into regional styles, say, Eastern and West- ern, and/or Central and Peripheral, remains under discussion. A summary review of women’s dress in the Sasanian era shows a large measure of consistency in basic styling with the minor modifications to be expected over the course of an extended time span. The Sasanian woman adopted and adapted the basic mode of dress that had been popu- lar earlier in Parthian times, those fashions which, in turn, were indebted to and often are indistinguishable from late Hellenistic and Roman dress in Asia. Her taste is reflected in the regional fashions of outer Iran and contiguous areas of Asia where Sasanian politics and culture played an important role. Elements of Sasanian dress persisted, with alterations, into early Islamic times, even as the Sasanian legacy is apparent in early Islamic architecture and its decoration, as well as in Islamic luxury and utilitarian goods5. The basic woman’s costume is a loose, sleeved shift that may be worn with a scarf or mantle and on occasion with a sleeved coat. Sometimes the shift is exchanged for the peplos. The Shift. When surveying the pictorial evidence, one quickly appre- ciates that it is the drawing style of the artists which first prompts the identification of costuming as Sasanian, rather than any single outstand- ing feature in the type of dress. Obviously, the woman’s dress of the Sasanian period is related to that worn in earlier years and in neighboring or distant regions, yet it still forms a unified corpus. The basic robe is a full-length shift or gown (comparable in the West to the Greek chiton, 5 Over seventy years ago, T. Wilson (1923, 95) admitted that he could not adduce evi- dence for the “intermediate steps” but was no less certain of the continuation of Persian painting into later Islamic art and crafts. 236 B. GOLDMAN the Roman tunica) with long sleeves that may carry decorative cuffs, is usually cinched just under the bosom or girdled at the waist, and is gen- erously cut from a light fabric that falls from the belting in a loose drape (A1, A9)6. Sometimes the Sasanian dame, like her modern counterpart wearing a floor-length evening dress, will catch up her gown fashion- ably in one hand to keep the full skirt from sweeping the ground (A4, A5)7. A characteristic trait of Sasanian artists when drawing the gown is to exaggerate the hemline, drawing it into a horizontal flounce billowing over the ground as if wind-swept (A9, A19), so broad as to suggest it may at time have been a sort of ruching added at the hemline (A3, A4)8. Variant manners of draping are depicted: usually the skirt is allowed to fall in vertical draping (A1), but also it is shown gathered into hori- zontal or diagonal folds (A2, A5)9; below the waist band it may be arranged in vertical pleating over one leg while caught up diagonally over the other (A7)10, In other representations the impression is given of a hobbled skirt, sharply constricted just above the ankles, flowing full and loose below (A3, A5)11; or the draping may be gathered into loop- ing folds over the haunch and then allowed to drop free to the broad hem (A4)12. Perhaps some of these variations may be charged in part to the individual craftsman’s shorthand rendering, but there is also no rea- son to suppose the Sasanian woman was any less creative in draping her long gowns than her nineteenth-century fashionable European coun- terpart. The Mantle. There is no preferred styling for the mantle; a single plate is decorated with women who carry their mantle in no less than 6 Variations in presenting the draping, e.g.