This may not be necessarily factually answerable; but thought I’d ask anyhow.
What was the very first tribe / culture / society to ‘decide’ that the clothes should be worn for specifically modesty reasons, rather than for decoration / protection from elements / ease of carrying items etc…
It seems a lot of existing tribes have had their dress codes ‘amended’ in (relatively speaking) recent times by missionaries who invoked a sense of guilt over expressed nudity that never existed before. But I suspect that the covering of (female) breasts or genitals would have been practiced much earlier; but how far back?
Did, say, c.5000-2500 Yangshao / Longshan cultures in China have dress codes for modesty reasons, or Indian cultures , or people in Mesopotamia maybe? Or perhaps any culture with sufficient organisation to have records and thus be remembered had already codified dress codes in place before records began?
Thanks for any insight.
