Colourful Costumes: Clothing of goddesses, gods, kings, and queens

Costumes consisting of kings’ kilts, queens’ garments, gods’ vests, and goddesses’ gowns are recorded in royal and non-royal tomb paintings of the New Kingdom from Thutmose IV to Ramesses XI. I believe these depictions represent real cloth. While examples of patterned fabrics can be seen in the clothing painted in the Aegean frescoes of Thera and Crete, the gift-bearing Minoan Keftiu in a scene from the Tomb of Rekhmira (TT100), and the well-dressed Levantines in the caravan of the Aamu of Shu (seen in the Tomb of Khnumhotep, BH3), such highly coloured garments were reserved in Egypt for royals and the elite. Hathor dressed in a blue patterned gown with a rishi (feather) motif, fr