| Abstrakt: |
Abstract:Dress allows us an entry into the visual culture of various societies, and this is particularly true of the Mongol Empire. Textiles in the Mongol Empire expressed social standing and political affiliation, and were also valuable currency used in gift exchange, tribute missions, and trade. This article takes a detailed approach to women’s court dress both because it has heretofore been ignored in scholarly literature, and the production and use of such clothing provides insights that can be applied to luxury textiles produced in the Mongol Empire more broadly. This study comparatively approaches women’s court dress in two parts of the Mongol Empire, the Yuan dynasty in China and Mongolia, and the Ilkhanate dynasty in Persia and the Middle East. It is the first to attempt to define Mongol women’s court dress that takes into account pictorial, archaeological, and textual sources. Due to limitations in surviving source material in both the Yuan and the Ilkhanate, the goal here is not to provide a definitive classification of types of dress, but to begin formulating an idea of what Mongol women were wearing in a courtly setting, and how the material they wore was produced. |
