Face covering before Islam

This subject opens with a warning rather than a claim, and the warning should travel with everything that follows.

What the record holds

This section covers two related but distinct things: head-veiling and face-covering — and keeping them apart is worth doing here too.

Assyria. Mesopotamia under the Assyrian kingdoms (1100–626 BC) is, on this account, the earliest civilisation to adopt veiling, head-covering, as a practice and a culture, and it also wrote the practice into law: statutes drafted around 1100 BC and amended around 700 BC prescribed severe penalties for related offences, including the cutting off of ears. This is about the head, not the face.

Greece. Face covering — described as an extension of, or addition to, head-veiling — is first recorded, on this account, in ancient Greece: through terracotta figures and vase painting, and among depictions of goddesses and upper-class Athenian women in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Homer's Odyssey places the practice in the eighth century BC.

Pierre Larousse is relayed with an explicit hedge: introduced with kononnya, "supposedly," at second hand through Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī's Arabic summary of the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle — as saying that Greek women covered the face with the end of a cloth, or with purpose-made veils from Kos, Amorgos and other islands, and that women of Thebes wore a special covering with two holes at the eyes to see through. This is not vouched for at first hand; it is a reported claim, consistent with the opening warning that the data here are too thin for confident conclusions.

Among the People of the Book. Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 CE), in The Paedagogus, objects to women seeking admiration and says they are told to cover the head and the face for that reason. The Didascalia, a passage dated to around 230 CE, is more direct still: "When there are baths in the city or the district, the faithful woman shall not bathe with men; for if you cover your face from strange men out of self-respect, how can you go to the baths together with strange men?"

The Susanna narrative in Daniel 13 is also cited here, with three immediate qualifications. First, canonically: this portion of Daniel is recognised as scripture only by Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, not by every Christian or Jewish tradition. Second, textually: the two men who accost Susanna ask her to remove her covering so they can look at her, but the passage does not clearly mention the face, and its context leaves open that what was to be seen was the body generally. Third, historically: the events are set some six centuries before Christ, in the time of Daniel, but some researchers deny there is any evidence Jewish women covered their faces at all.

That triple qualification is why the site treats Daniel 13 as the weakest item in this list rather than dropping it. It stays in view while being explicit about how little weight it can bear.

Pre-Islamic Arabia. Tertullian, in On the Veiling of Virgins, describes pagan Arab women covering head and face so completely that a single eye was left free to see.

Arabic itself carries a further piece of evidence: it had a dedicated word for the act of uncovering the face, sufūr, distinct from the vocabulary for the garments themselves. A society does not coin and keep a specific term for undoing a practice unless the practice is established enough to need naming.

What cannot be claimed

That it was universal. The position is stated explicitly:

It is not being said that all, or even most, pre-Islamic Arab women covered their faces — only that it was certainly a normal practice in that society.

This distinction is load-bearing in both directions. It denies the claim that face covering was a purely Islamic innovation, and it equally denies the claim that it was the settled norm everywhere before Islam.

A page asserting that face veiling was widely practised before Islam would be overstating a case the evidence itself does not support.