Histories

It would seem that the robe and aegis of the images of Athena were copied by the Greeks from the Libyan women; for except that Libyan women dress in leather, and that the tassels of their goatskin cloaks are not snakes but thongs of hide, in everything else their equipment is the same.

And in fact, the very name betrays that the attire of the statues of Pallas has come from Libya [17,25] (nation), AfricaLibya; for Libyan women wear the hairless tasselled “aegea” over their dress, colored with madder, and the Greeks have changed the name of these aegeae into their “aegides.”[*](The aegis is the conventional buckler of Pallas. Probably the conservatism of religious art retained for the warrior goddess the goatskin buckler which was one of the earliest forms of human armor.)