At Qasr Ibrim, in Egyptian Nubia, a small temple of the Isis cult was discovered in 1986. The ransacked temple and its ritual paraphernalia were preserved when the walls were pulled down, sealing the destroyed furnishings on the temple floor. This scene is interpreted as clear-cut evidence of the Nubians' acceptance of Christianity, which required the total repudiation of the old religion, including the destruction of all ritual objects. This desecration underscores the symbolic power of the temple and its contents, which could not be simply ignored when their ideology was supplanted but had to be utterly destroyed. And that symbolic power extended also to that most definitive marker of group identity: dress. Whole garments were discarded or were torn apart and thrown away. The repudiation of dress styles, going back to Old Kingdom times 3,500 years earlier, was perhaps the strongest statement the Nubians could make to indicate their readiness to join the medieval world. And without the textile remains, these understandings would be lost to archaeology.
