The Pleated Dress of Nywty

A description of a fragment of a pleated dress, discovered in situ in 1982 by the late Peter Munro and his team in the tomb of Nywty. An evaluation of its importance for our understanding of pleated dresses in ancient Egypt. Janssen, The Pleated Dress of Nywty PJAEE, 17(1) (2020) PalArch Foundation 2 IntroductIon It was in 1984, that I started to engage in two years of correspondence with the late Professor Peter Munro regarding his announcement in the pages of Göttinger Miszellen of the discovery of the pleated dress of Nywty (Munro, 1983: 102-103). Together with my then future husband, I visited Professor Munro at his home in Hannover, and over dinner he suggested that I write a chapter to be included in one of his final volumes. That evening is still fresh in my memory, with Professor Munro exuding the greatest enthusiasm for his Scottish ancestry. By contrast, the reasons why the proposed chapter itself never saw the light of day remain shrouded in the mists of time. I merely afforded it brief mentions in three of my own publications (Hall, 1985: 243; 1986: 29, 31; Janssen & Janssen, 1990: 34-351). It was therefore a considerable surprise to be contacted by Dr. André Veldmeijer in 2017, and asked to return to the subject once again as part of a project to ensure the publication of Munro’s outstanding excavation work at Saqqara.2 In taking up Veldmeijer’s gauntlet to publish “the stuff [that] has been around for thousands of years”, the message is that an Egyptological contribution can hopefully gain from a period of long gestation (Personal Communication A.J. Veldmeijer, 31 May 2019). While it has taken thirty-five years, the caveat is that I can now draw on the discoveries and contributions of other scholars in relation to pleated dresses and their non-pleated counterparts. Moreover, it is entirely fitting to dedicate this contribution to the memory of the late Professor Munro at a time when the cries for the independence of his beloved Scotland grow increasingly stronger.