Station: [18] Clothing

In the ancient Near East, clothing meant as much as gold. People wore a robe and a petticoat. A cloak was sufficient for the night. If a king wanted to show off, he had his clothes carved in stone, for example: I own one hundret and forty garments made of sixty different fabrics. Jewish people's clothes reached down to their knees. The exception was the rich, whose clothes reached down to the floor. Nakedness was an expression of being a slave. The lower hem was characterized by threads hanging down. You could press these into the damp clay and thus have a kind of signature, as the threads were different lengths for everyone. The priests carried a kind of bag with twelf stones in the front, symbolizing the twelf tribes of Israel.