Kausia

The kausia or causia (Ancient Greek: καυσία^[1]) was an ancient Macedonian flat hat. A purple kausia with a diadem was worn by the Macedonian kings as part of the royal costume.^[2]

Two 4th and 3rd century BC terracotta statues from Athens depicting Ancient Greeks wearing the kausia.

Name

The name is derived from its keeping off the heat (καῦσις, kaûsis).^[2]

Background

It was worn during the Hellenistic period but perhaps even before the time of Alexander the Great^[3] and was later used as a protection against the sun by the poorer classes in Rome.^[4]

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 Macedonians and the rest of the Greeks 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.^[5]

Ernst Fredricksmeyer has suggested that the similarity between the modern pakol worn in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Northwest India and the Macedonian kausia can be explained by natives adopting it from Greek soldiers and settlers after the conquest of Alexander.^[6] Bonnie Kingsley, while comparing the kausia with the pakol, has suggested that it might have come to the Mediterranean as a campaign hat worn by Alexander and veterans of his campaigns in the Indus Valley,^[7] particularly after Alexander's campaign in 327/326 BC in the East, obtaining them from the people in the southern Hindu Kush.^[8] According to Fredricksmeyer, the kausia was too established a staple of the Macedonian wardrobe for it to have been imported from Asia to Macedonia.^[9] Willem Vogelsang dismisses either theory, stating that pakol independently appeared in the early modern period.^[10]

Gallery

Ancient Macedonian soldiers, from the tomb of Agios Athanasios (Greece) wearing the kausia, grave of Agios Athanasios, 4th century BC
Coin of Greco-Bactrian king Antimachus I Theos wearing the Macedonian kausia, c.185–170 BC
Antigonus II Gonatas wearing the kausia and holding a spear, detail of a fresco in Villa Fannius, c. 40 BC, Archaeological Museum of Naples

References

[1]
Henry George Liddell; Robert Scott. "καυσία". A Greek-English Lexicon – via Perseus.
[2]
Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898), Causia This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
[3]
Kingsley, Bonnie M. (1984). "The Kausia Diadematophoros". American Journal of Archaeology. 88 (1): 66–68. doi:10.2307/504602. JSTOR 504602. S2CID 193037990.
[4]
Plautus, Titus Maccius (1997). Miles Gloriosus. Harvard University Press. p. 184. ISBN 978-0-674-57437-3.
[5]
Roisman, Joseph; Worthington, Ian (2010). A Companion to Ancient Macedonia. John Wiley and Sons. p. 87. ISBN 978-1-4051-7936-2.
[6]
Fredricksmeyer, E. A. (1994). "The Kausia: Macedonian or Indian?". Ventures into Greek history. Clarendon Press. p. 158. ISBN 978-0198149286. The similarity between the modern Eastern chitrali and the ancient kausia, unless fortuitous, can perhaps be accounted for by an assumption that natives of Afghanistan and/or northwest India adopted the kausia from Macedonian and Greek soldiers, settlers and traders in the wake of Alexander's conquests and in the course of the extensive interactions between East and West in those regions in the succeeding centuries, and that the cap has somehow survived there to this day. Meanwhile, we may be fairly confident that Alexander's Macedonians did not acquire the kausia, the 'Macedonian' chlamys, and the krepides from the Indians in the winter of 327/6, and did not adopt this ensemble near instantaneously as virtually their national garb.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
[7]
Kingsley, Bonnie M. (1981). "The Cap That Survived Alexander". American Journal of Archaeology. 85 (1): 39–46. doi:10.2307/504964. ISSN 0002-9114.
[8]
Kingsley, Bonnie (1991). "Alexander's "Kausia" and Macedonian Tradition". Classical Antiquity. 10 (1): 59–76. doi:10.2307/25010941. ISSN 0278-6656. The Macedonians, officers and men, and probably others accompanying them had acquired their kausiai and robes in the southern Hindu Kush or along the Kabul in the winter of 327/6 B.C. from "barbarians," some of whose Aryan descendants today make and wear the caps and cloaks in the same way.
[9]
Fredricksmeyer, Ernst (1986). "Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kausia". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 116: 215–227. doi:10.2307/283917. JSTOR 283917.
[10]
Vogelsang, Willem (2006). "The Pakol: A Distinctive, but Apparently not so Very Old Headgear from the Indo-Iranian Borderlands". Khil'a. 2: 149–155. doi:10.2143/KH.2.0.2021290. There certainly appears to be an uncanny resemblance between the pakol and a headgear worn by the ancient Greeks and Macedonians, the so-called kausia. It subsequently proved attractive and rather romantic for some writers to link the pakol to Alexander the Great's campaigns in the Indo-Afghan borderlands in the late fourth century BC. The pakol was also connected to the Bactrian-Greek and Indo-Greek kingdoms of the ensuing centuries, and to the many local stories of Greek origin among the population of the borderlands. In this brief article I want to discuss the pakol and its history, and try to point out that the pakol has a very recent history in Nuristan, going back no older than the late nineteenth century, but also that the same headgear is relatively young in neighbouring Chitral.

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