Where did this tunic ornament go?
The vast majority of ancient tunics found in modern museums and collections (most of them surviving only as fragments) were originally discovered in, and sometimes stolen from, grave sites. When people in late Roman and Coptic Egypt buried their dead, they wrapped them in many layers of clothing, then tied a burial shroud around the body using cloth tapes or ribbons. Because of Egypt’s hot and dry climate, these fabrics often survived the intervening centuries in surprisingly good condition. Archaeologists began excavating Coptic burial sites in the late 1800s, and would often just cut out attractive or interesting parts of the clothing that they discovered within. This well may have been the case with our example, which was given to Harvard University in 1917 by the noted art historian, theorist, and collector Denman Waldo Ross. As a result, while we can guess what the rest of the original garment might have looked like, we do not know where it was found, or where it might have travelled beforehand.
