The Achaemenid Body: Making and Reflecting on Achaemenid Art and Fashion Histories

On the walls of Achaemenid Persian monuments, metal and fabric, hair and skin are entangled, suggesting that dress, with its focus upon body modification, supplementation, and communicative potentials, and encompassing expressions from clothing to jewelry, hairstyles to comportment, can serve as a productive lens through which to re-frame the relationships between the many groups that constitute the empire.

This panel considers the utility of dress theory and fashion history to explore the iterative, enmeshed relationships between king and subject, human and animal, animate and inanimate, and to complicate the boundaries between such categories to consider questions such as: how can explorations of intersections between dress and the senses enliven our understanding of the making of Achaemenid art? In what ways does making, wearing, and reproducing ancient dress enable both understanding and re-interpretation of both Achaemenid art and Achaemenid history?

Understanding the ways in which the meanings of dress are socially and culturally dependent, the panel seeks papers that consider questions of dress, iconographies of dress, and their production, together with the social construction of bodies, from any region under the control of or in contact with the Achaemenid system in the period between 550-BCE-330 BCE, and in the preceding and subsequent periods, encompassing both influences upon the Achaemenid period and influences stemming from it. The session similarly welcomes papers exploring these concepts from the perspective of art history, archaeology, experimental archaeology, anthropology, and fashion history, to enable the exploration of productive overlaps between these disciplinary categories.