Custom, Combat, and Ceremony Java and the Inda-Persian Textile Trade Jii'i JAKL & Tom HooGERVORST* ludo-Persian connections and textile This paper lies at the intersection of two underexplored topics: dress in pre- Islamic Java and Indo-Persian contacts with the Indonesian Archipelago, both commercial and cultural. We start by situating these contacts in a his- torical context. Recent archaeological findings reveal an influx of pre-Islamic Sassanid ('neo-Persian') material culture at ~ifferent Indian Ocean sites, reaching Southeast Asia between the second and sixth centuries CE (Jacq- Hergoualc'h 2002; Salmon 2004; Ritter 2009). Scrap glass from the Middle East (and India) was reworked at several Southeast Asian sites, mainly to produce wound and drawn beads, bangles, and other small items (Miksic 2013; Perret 2014). Glassware from Lower Mesopotamia was imported to maritime Southeast Asia and China from at least the sixth century CE (Meyer 1992), whereas from the mid-eighth century, under the Abbasid Califate, the characteristic turquoise 'Persian ware' pottery entered Indian Ocean networks through Basra (Glover 2002; Salmon 2004; Chaisuwan 2011 ). The recently excavated Belitung shipwreck dated to the ninth century CE provides the first evidence for direct trade between the Middle East and China (Flecker 2002, 2010; Guy 2010). An equally spectacular cargo recently recovered from the so-called 'Siren ofCirebon', a merchant vessel that wrecked around 970 CE on her way to Java (Liebner 2014: v), demonstrates a variety of blown-glass vessels popular among the Javanese by the late first millennium CE. Unsurprisingly, imported textiles hardly proved as durable as glass and ceramics. Textual and linguistic evidence, therefore, are indispensable to study early sartorial exchanges between the Persian Gulf and Java. Textual evidence suggests Persian involvement in the pre-Islamic maritime trade with China (Wolters 1967; Hourani 1995; Salmon 2004), naturally passing through Maritime Southeast Asia. The seventh-century Arabic incursions into what is now Iran undoubtedly revitalized the Persian orientation towards '' Jifi Jakl, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, jirka.jakl@seznam.cz; Tom Hoogervorst, Royal Netherlands Institute ofSoutheastAsian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), hoogervorst@kitlv.nl. We are indebted to the editor of this journal and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and directions to further readings. Tom Hoogervorst gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) as part,of its Innovative Research incentive ('Vemieuwingsimpuls').