Fabric, Status, Style

Hohentübingen Castle is home to a long-lost treasure: a collection of 40 late antique textiles and fragments of textiles from tombs in Egypt dating from between the 3rd and 9th centuries AD. They are fragments of garments in which the deceased were buried, as well as household textiles, such as blankets and hangings, which were used as grave goods or to wrap the bodies. The textiles' exceptional state of preservation aroused keen interest amongst 19th-century collectors, leading to many of them being cut into smaller fragments before finding their way into private collections, and eventually into museums and university collections – including that of Tübingen.

To celebrate the 550th anniversary of the University of Tübingen, in the exhibition ‘Fabric, Status, Style: Late Antique Textiles at the University of Tübingen’, the textiles are presented as a coherent collection for the first time, inviting visitors to discover them as direct testimonies to the material culture of a period marking the transition from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Islamic and Byzantine eras.