Kausia

The kausia (Ancient Greek: καυσία[1]) was an ancient Macedonian flat hat.

Two 4th and 3rd century BC terracotta statues from Athens depicting Ancient Greeks wearing the kausia.
Ancient Macedonian soldiers, from the tomb of Agios Athanasios (Greece) wearing the causia (grave of Agios Athanasios, IV BC, before the invasion of India by Alexander the Great.

It was worn during the Hellenistic period but perhaps even before the time of Alexander the Great[2] and was later used as a protection against the sun by the poorer classes in Rome.[3]

Indo-Greek king Antialcidas wearing the kausia. Japan Currency Museum.

Depictions of the kausia can be found on a variety of coins and statues found from the Mediterranean to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and the Indo-Greeks in northwestern India. The Persians referred to both the rest of the Greeks and Macedonians as "Yauna" (Ionians), but made a distinction between "Yauna by the sea" and those "with hats that look like shields" (yauna takabara), probably referring to the Macedonian kausia hat.[4] According to Bonnie Kingsley the kausia may have came to the Mediterranean as a campaign hat worn by Alexander and veterans of his campaigns in India[5] but according to Ernst Fredricksmeyer the kausia was too established a staple of the Macedonian wardrobe for it to have been imported from Asia to Macedonia.[6]

A modern descendant of the hat may be the Pakol: the familiar and remarkably similar men's hat from Afghanistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.[7]

Alexander (left), wearing a kausia and fighting an Asiatic lion with his friend Craterus (detail); late 4th century BC mosaic,[8] Pella Museum.

See also

References
  1. καυσία, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
  2. "The Kausia Diadematophoros", American Journal of Archaeology, 1984, on JSTOR
  3. "Miles gloriosus", Harvard University Press, 1997, on Google books
  4. Roisman, Joseph; Worthington, Ian (2010). A Companion to Ancient Macedonia. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 1-4051-7936-8, p.87
  5. Kingsley, Bonnie M (1981). ""The Cap That Survived Alexander."". American Journal of Archaeology. 85: 39.
  6. Fredricksmeyer, Ernst (1986). "Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kausia". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 116: 215–227.
  7. Ian Worthington, Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, Ventures into Greek history, p. 135, Clarendon Press, 1994
  8. Olga Palagia (2000). "Hephaestion’s Pyre and the Royal Hunt of Alexander," in A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham (eds), Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198152873, p. 185.


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