the Carthaginians used moneybags strapped to their wrists
or on a cord around their necks.
Most Carthaginians dressed modestly, covering most
of the body. Because the nights were cold, many Carthagin-
ians wore cloaks, and several cloak clasps have been found
in Carthaginian graves. Many Carthaginians also regularly
wore hats, and it seems to have been one feature that diff er-
entiated free men from slaves, who were oft en bare-headed.
Carthaginian women wore dresses similar to those worn by
Greeks, oft en with heavy embroidery. Shoes were similar to
those worn by the Greeks, with men wearing leather sandals.
Carthaginian soldiers dressed in the Greek fashion with a
plumed Th racian-style helmet, breastplate, and tunic colored
red for offi cers and purple for men of the noble cavalry. In
battle Carthaginians wore high open-toed boots. Most of
the infantry, the men who made up the Carthaginian citizen
spearmen, were barefoot in battle.
The clothing of Numidian and Mauritanian rulers
tended to imitate Carthaginian and then Roman cloth-
ing. Many of the subjects wore simple, short tunics that
allowed movement and exposure to the sun. The cavalry
tended to wear a loose, unbleached singlet, or loose shirt,
held at the shoulders with two brooches. Some men also
wore a strip of leather or wildcat fur around their heads.
When horsemen were riding, the lower part of the tunic
was pulled up, leaving most of the legs exposed. They did
not use footwear. It seems likely that these fashions were
also followed in Cyrenaica, in modern-day Libya. The
Libyans who fought in the Carthaginian army tended to
wear very short tunics made of soft red leather, later called
Morocco leather. Many images of Simon of Cyrene show a
black man wearing long, loose-fitting robes helping Jesus
on the day of the Crucifixion. According to the Greek his-
torian Herodotus (ca. 484–430/420 b.c.e.), some women in
Libya wore a bronze ring on each leg, while others wore
leather bands around their ankles.
In the Sahara loose tunics similar to those worn by Car-
thaginians seem to have been favored by the merchants who
followed the ancient trade routes through central Africa.
Even the Romans in North Africa wore a hooded woolen gar-
ment known as a birrus, similar to the burnoose, a one-piece
hooded cloak worn by Arabs. Most of the people crossing the
Sahara, men and women, wore headscarves and possibly dyed
their robes bright colors, making their dress little diff erent
from that of the Tuareg people of modern-day West Africa.
People in the desert oft en wore a cloth over the face, giving
them the nickname “men of the blue veil.” Excavations of
graves at the monument to the early Tuareg leader Tin Hinan
show that Morocco leather was used in clothing. Herodotus
describes a competition in Ethiopia involving the stringing
of a bow, at the end of which a scarlet robe is awarded, in-
dicating that the color was unusual in the area at the time.
At Meroë, in Sudan, small fragments of textiles dating from
the ancient period are cotton, showing the importance of this
material in clothing of the region.
Farther south, in modern-day East Africa, there are no
surviving descriptions of ancient clothing. Diogenes (ca. 320
b.c.e.), whom the geographer Ptolemy (fl. second century
c.e.) suggests visited modern-day Kenya, makes no mention
of clothing or lack of clothing of the local people. Th e dress
may have been little diff erent from that in Nubia at the time
and probably was similar to the cotton garment worn by tra-
ditional Masai today. Th ese cloths were oft en brightly col-
ored and worn over one shoulder, leaving the other parts of
the body bare. Few of these peoples would have worn shoes,
though it is possible that some people might have worn san-
dals imported from other regions. It also seems probable
that the dress of the Bantu of southern Africa and of tribes
such as the Khoikhoi and the San would have changed little
from ancient times to the early 20th century. In Madagas-
car, though most clothing was made from cotton, wool was
worn in the south, and silk, obtained from Asia, was worn
in the northeast.Petroglyph of a human fi gure wearing a loincloth, from the Sahara
Desert at Tassili, Algeria, North Africa (© Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System. Photographer: Jeanne Tabachnick)clothing and footwear: Africa 273