Dress and identity in Christian Nubia

In the 1960s, archaeologists excavating the Lower Nubian site of Qasr Ibrim uncovered, adjacent to the cathedral, a cemetery from the Christian era, which contained the well-preserved textiles of high-ranking ecclesiastics. Elisabeth G. Crowfoot (1914–2005) undertook analysis of this material, but her complete publication of it, Qasr Ibrim: The Textiles from the Cathedral Cemetery, was not published until 2011. The volume describes in meticulous detail the graves and materials unearthed. Working from excavators' notes, photographs, and, in some fortunate cases, retained garments, Crowfoot created an almost complete picture of the burials in the cathedral cemetery. The present essay relies on Crowfoot's reconstruction for further interpretation of the cathedral cemetery's textiles. A single burial, used here as a case study, frames the material in its larger cultural context, which yields information on what burial garments can teach about ecclesiastics' roles in Christian Nubia. The study shows that the garments in this burial were carefully chosen to emphasize the status of the deceased, stressing especially their civic, religious, and economic authority. Prestige of these types emerge as having been closely linked in Christian Nubia and were key to the construction of ecclesiastical identity.