Of all the ancient Egyptian artifacts that survived the sands of time, some of the most important are clothes, which separates Egypt from many of its contemporaries. The dryness of the Egyptian desert, combined with a burial culture that deliberately equipped the dead for an afterlife, preserved textiles that have decayed almost everywhere else in the ancient world. Whole garments have come out of Egyptian tombs, some of them still folded as they were packed. Wigs survive with their curls intact and their setting wax still holding, and sandals survive with the wear of a particular foot in them. Cosmetic jars survive with the paint still inside, and the paint can be analyzed. The tomb of the architect Kha and his wife Merit, found undisturbed in 1906, yielded their clothes, their wigs, their cosmetic equipment, and the household goods of two real people who died more than 3,000 years ago. The tomb of Tutankhamun held more than 100 items of clothing, including tunics, kilts, sashes, gloves, and dozens of pairs of sandals.

With these artifacts intact, it quickly became clear to modern Egyptologists that the ancient Egyptians’ own art was full of lies. Egyptian artists worked to a strict convention that valued clarity, order, and the ideal over the observed, so bodies were shown in a composite view that presented each part from its most recognizable angle, and people were sized by importance rather than by distance. In the same vein, clothing was rendered according to what it meant rather than what it actually looked like. The single most famous garment in Egyptian art - the tight sheath dress that clings to every painted woman from breast to ankle - turned out on examination not to be a garment at all, and modern reconstructions that trusted the ancient art got it wrong for a century.