• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.696-713
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• 2024

This study aims to gain insight into society and culture in the 10th to 7th centuries B.C. by exploring the clothing in Assyria, which was the most powerful force in Mesopotamian civilization at the time. As a research method, literature and empirical studies were conducted in parallel, focusing on a total of 127 Assyrian artifacts held in domestic and foreign museums. The results of this study are as follows. The basic forms of Assyrian clothing are tunics and shawls. The tunics have short sleeves and are knee or ankle length with a special type of tassel decoration. They have a wide belt at the waist, and a decorative panel is attached vertically below with a strap. In addition to the basic clothing, there are loincloths and overskirts, with some having open right sides and fringe decorations to denote a higher status. The overskirt has a third or fourth-tier skirt structure with an open front and fringe decorations on the edges. Most military members, except for archers, wore knee-length tunics as uniforms. As for armor, they wore short-chest or knee-length coat-type lamella armor. Headwear mainly consisted of cylindrical hats and headband-type decorations. In the case of bracelets, mainly rosette-shaped decorations and simple ring-shaped bracelets with three or one turn were worn. For shoes, sandals were mainly worn, and soldiers mainly wore boots. As a result, each costume element is expressed in various ways depending on the wearer's status, clearly showing Assyrian costume culture.