Ancient Korean conical hats: https://www.fmkorea.com/7133259093 Early Joseon double-bun hair: https://www.fmkorea.com/9260696539 Goguryeo King's hat: https://www.fmkorea.com/9265913441 Goryeo King's attire: https://www.fmkorea.com/9270461390 Goryeo married woman's hairstyle: https://www.fmkorea.com/9272242079 Long hair for men in pre-modern Korea: https://www.fmkorea.com/9281216914 Unique pre-modern Korean hairstyles: https://www.fmkorea.com/9292955662 I've been posting quite a bit lately about pre-modern Korean clothing and hairstyles like this. With the recent trailer for Christopher Nolan's <Odyssey> dropping, Greek mythology is a hot topic, so I figured I'd talk about that this time.

Christopher Nolan's <Odyssey> was just revealed. I'm personally really hyped for the movie itself, but honestly, the costume design is getting a ton of flak.

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I mean, it's a mythological setting, so asking for perfect historical accuracy is nonsense, but people are saying the designs look too much like Batman and the materials look like plastic. Especially this character's (Agamemnon) armor. It's gotten to the point where memes like this are going around.

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Well, I didn't write this post just to bash the accuracy of a movie that hasn't even been released yet, so let's stop making fun of Agamemnon and look at what the actual clothing of that era looked like. You might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just say accuracy is meaningless because it's mythology?" Let me explain. The Dangun myth is obviously a myth; there's no way the son of a god descended from heaven and gave birth to Dangun with a bear. That didn't actually happen. However, the content of the Dangun myth is about the 'founding of Gojoseon,' so there is a clear historical era (the early Gojoseon period proven archaeologically) that overlaps with the timeline of the myth. Greek mythology is the same. Zeus sleeping with every married woman in sight or Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite fighting over a golden apple is just fantasy and storytelling, but some events in the myths overlap with actual historical events (the Trojan War being the prime example). Therefore, there's a point where the 'mythological timeline' and the 'historical era' intersect. So, which era overlaps with the Greek myths?

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It's the 17th to 11th century BC, the period when the Mycenaean civilization existed. In Eastern history, it roughly overlaps with the Shang Dynasty. My knowledge of Western history is a bit shallow so I'm not 100% sure, but besides Mycenae, the Minoan civilization (which came before Mycenae) probably overlaps with the mythological timeline too. So, what did the clothing of this Minoan-Mycenaean civilization look like? Since we saw the <Odyssey> movie stills, let's start with the armor.

The most common armor of that era looked like this. First, you have to realize that Greece during the Mycenaean period wasn't in the Iron Age, so soldiers were mainly armed with bronze. That's why it looks completely different from the style people usually imagine when they think of 'Ancient Greece.' Western history buffs sometimes call this specific style, made of curved bronze plates linked together, 'Lobster Armor.'

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If you look closely at the helmet, it's made by joining white pieces together—those are boar tusks. Since bronze wasn't as common as iron, people in the Bronze Age (both East and West) used armor made of leather or bone alongside bronze armor, and the Mycenaeans were no exception (though bone scale armor has been found in Baekje ruins long after they entered the Iron Age). These boar tusk helmets were used until the 10th century BC, and while they don't seem to have been used in actual combat after that, their existence seems to have remained known. That's why boar tusk helmets are mentioned in the <Iliad> when Odysseus is preparing the Trojan Horse scheme (Homer, the author of the <Iliad>, lived in the 8th century BC).

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I mentioned that the armor above was the 'most common Mycenaean armor,' but there were actually various other forms of Mycenaean armor besides that style. It's obvious, but back then, they didn't mass-produce standardized gear in factories, and commanders often customized their armor personally, so various forms were bound to exist. Now that we know what the armor looked like, what did regular cloth clothing look like back in the Mycenaean days?

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First off, the structure of men's clothing in Mycenaean times was very simple. What you see in the bottom left of this picture is male cloth clothing from that era; just a one-piece tunic with an extra cloth wrapped around the waist.

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Sometimes they didn't even wear the tunic and just went shirtless, wrapping a cloth around their waist for a breezy look. Maybe it's because Greece is on the warmer side, but the clothing structure is basically designed with a lot of exposure. So, what about women's clothing? The reason I started this post was Christopher Nolan's <Odyssey>, and since the original <Odyssey> features quite a few female characters like Queen Penelope of Ithaca or the Goddess of War Athena, we need to take a look at women's fashion too.

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...!!!! By today's standards, you could say it's extremely peculiar... In Mycenaean times, women's fashion very often involved exposing the upper body. But it's not like just anyone was walking around like that; the 'higher the social status,' the more likely they were to expose their chest. We know this because murals depicting goddesses or priestesses almost always show them with exposed breasts, while depictions of servants or common people often show them covered up. ................... Even if it's the age of mythology, shouldn't they follow at least the minimum historical accuracy? Could it be that Christopher Nolan lacks professional integrity? It's an R-rated movie anyway, so maybe he needed to show us what a real 'authentic historical drama' looks like? Man, as a history buff, I'm just really worried about this.