Peacock, J. 2005. Shoes. The Complete Sourcebook. – Londen, Thames & Hudson

Abstract

Occasionally, books are published which are easy to discuss, even after having read only the first few pages. ‘Shoes. The Complete Sourcebook’ is such a book. As archaeologist of Egypt, I work with leather, basketry and cordage and focus on studying footwear. Therefore, this review is based mainly on the small part that deals with the ancient Egyptian footwear.

Having studied well over 1000 pieces of footwear in all major Egyptological collections all over the world, one of the first things that struck me when opening the book is the fact that the various types of footwear are assigned specific groups or functions. The majority of material housed in the collections were obtained in the 19^th century and lack provenance and date, let alone indications of its owner. One example is the sandal referred to as priest’s sandal (p. 10 [no. 7], 25). This type of sandal is rather common but there is no indication that this type of sandals were only worn by priests, if indeed there was any type of sandal at all specific to a certain group of people. The bleaching of the vegetable fibres is absolute nonsense and I have no clue how the author obtained this information (the book has no references and there is no information on how the author came to his conclusion). The processing of raw material for basketry has been well documented (for example Wendrich, 1999) and does not include bleaching. Furthermore, the strips of vegetable material are not woven but plaited. Read more...