I frequently mourn the fact that so little is commonly known about the smaller details of traditional Jewish life. And I don't mean diaspora Jewish life, it's amazing how much we know and have preserved of various diaspora community traditions.
I mean ancient Judean lifestyles. And yes, the Torah outlines a lot of it, which is amazing. But I don't want to just know that Judean women wore jewelry or nose rings or etc, I want to be able to know what our traditional Jewish jewelry looked like. Smaller specifics instead of the broad strokes.
We can know what religious garb looked like, and even the general gist of day to day clothing. But I want to know specifically what colors people would dye their clothes for their personal tastes, the specific embroidery designs that were worn.
I want to know how traditional Judean women wore their hair, both how they wore their head coverings (knot styles, accessories for the coverings, etc) and how unmarried women would adorn their heads.
I want to know what traditional Judean makeup looked like, what toys the children played with, so so so many aspects of ancient Jewish life that I have been able to find nothing about.
Maybe, of course, I just don't know enough history. But I've tried googling these things and I have not ever found a satisfactory answer.
I wish to know what traditional, pre-occupation, pre-exile Jewish life was like.
If anyone knows anything about any of this, please please please reblog or send an ask or comment about anything you know.
This topic is of great interest to me but I'm not great at finding good history information, I've got more experience doing in-depth research on current events and politics.
I'm prefacing this with the admission that I'm not an expert on jewelry, I study animal bones, but I am an archaeologist who studies the relevant time period and regions, so here's some quick examples of Iron Age (in Jewish Chronology Judges through First Temple) jewelry from Tel Beth Shemesh
(Golani, Amir, and Deborah Sweeney. “THE IRON AGE JEWELRY.” Tel Beth-Shemesh: A Border Community in Judah, vol. 34, Penn State University Press, 2021, p. 610)
The article goes into detail on materials and how they were constructed, etc. but it's an academic text first so may be a bit dry.
