Tarkhan dress

The dress, coded UC28614B, is currently in the collection of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London. Radiocarbon dating in 1978 estimated the item to have been created around 2362 BC, though a further test in 2015 by the University of Oxford affirms, with 95% accuracy, that the dress dates from between 3482 and 3102 BC.

Discovery

The Tarkhan Dress was discovered in 1913, during the second season of Flinders Petrie's excavations of the Tarkhan necropolis. During the excavation of Mastaba 2050, the dress was found alongside other linen outside of the Mastaba. It is theorised that these linens may have been thrown out later in antiquity and sanded over, which preserved the artefacts. The linen was sent to the University College London for analysis, where it lay untouched for sixty five years.

The dress was rediscovered in 1977 by conservationists at the Victoria and Albert Museum who were sorting through and cleaning "funerary rags".