I’d like to add, with the caveat that I’m not a professional, that having worked leather the given explanation for how these garments are made seems completely plausible to me. I’m tempted to try a bit of experimental archaeology but frankly I don’t have the time to re-create all the relevant elements.
Let me go into a bit more detail and some speculation as to How I Would Do It.
Now, I have never dealt with oil-cured gazelle skin. Oil-curing is virtually unknown in modern times, as it is inferior to modern tanning in pretty much every way - though I bet it’s very kind to the skin, which is would be desirable for such a garment. And gazelle skin is… well, it wouldn’t be impossible to get, but it’s not something a North American leatherworker handles very often. I’d like to mention here that oil-cured gazelle skin is - as the linked paper above mentions, technically not leather, but I will be referring to it as such hereafter for simplicity and as the closest modern analogue.
My immediate guess was that the leather used would be something like deerskin - soft, stretchy, not very strong. But on a bit more thought I think that’s not the case at all. To get a garment as depicted, I think the material would be rather more like goatskin: thin, strong, moderately soft, not very stretchy. Gloving leather, in modern terms. That’s what I’d try first, at any rate.
Now, it’s obscure to me as to why they chose this kind of leather for their undergarments when they clearly had access to cotton and linen, materials that other cultures preferred for such uses. I can guess that it might have been due to economy - leather could have been cheaper than woven cloth; it may have been a perceived or real matter of hygiene, or durability. It could have simply been a cultural preference: bear in mind that the pre-Pharonic people of the region were once referred to as Penistaschen Leute (penis-sheath people) based on the Eastern Desert petroglyphs from that period, and they may have retained a cultural preference to protect their genitals with animal skins even after woven cloth became available.
Whatever the reason, at some point they transitioned from the pre-Pahronic loincloths to a more structured, closer-fitting garment and doubtless ran into the inherent flaws with using leather: that it does not breath, and it does not stretch enough for such a high movement part of the body. Potentially we can see transitional artifacts or depictions which would shed light on how this garment evolved.
Now, from a leathering perspective both issues can be solved in the same way: with cutouts. My personal suspicion is that the cutouts were initially for ventilation as larger cutouts (or, potentially, starting with a loose loincloth and adding ties to keep it from moving so freely). Over time they adopted much smaller but more numerous cutouts which enabled a closer-fitting garment which nonetheless was comfortable and did not restrict freedom of movement. Again, speculatively transitional artifacts or depictions might exist - but it’s entirely possible that the leap from “loincloth” to “leather fishnet” was accomplished by a single artisan and then rapidly popularized.
As to the construction of the garment, I wholly agree that there was no need for a specialized tool. Ancient Egyptian smiths were entirely capable of making a full set of leathering tools, most of which would be familiar today. I am sure I’ve seen copper head knives much as are still in use (granted modern examples are steel). This versatile tool would serve quite well for making exactly the kind of cuts we see in these garments. An Ancient Egyptian leatherer, then, likely just reached for their most familiar tool.
Now if I were to make one of these garments, there are two other tools I’d need: a straight-edge and a cutting board. A more skilled leatherer might be able to make the cuts freehand, but a skilled leather would also recognize the merits of not doing things the hard way for no reason. If my speculative method is correct, I suspect we would find a straight tool, likely with a number of evenly-spaced marks, as a guide for making the holes. As for the cutting board, this should be reasonably obvious, that making even cuts requires a solid surface but one soft enough to not ruin the cutting blade. If a cutting board had been used for this purpose, I’d expect to find lines of nicks in the board. However, cutting boards are necessarily consumable resources - they will be disposed of after they are no longer usable. Also, given the relative scarcity of wood in Ancient Egypt they may have used other, more degradable materials for their cutting boards.
I think specialized tools are unlikely. Such tools might make sense for a larger scale mass production operation: we can envision a factory which made nothing but undergarments. However, to my knowledge in Ancient Egypt most finished goods of this nature were made locally and custom-ordered. There was not an Ancient Egyptian “Fruit of the Loom”; one simply went to the local leatherer and paid them to make a garment. On that scale, specialized tools would actually slow down the process for a number of reasons, and I doubt any leatherworker would feel the need to get a custom tool for something they could easily do by hand.
Now, at this point I feel I should emphasize again that I am not a professional Egyptologist, and much of what I have said is speculative. While I have made a few predictions which would either prove or disprove my speculation, I have not checked to see if that evidence exists. Should a professional feel that this post is misinforming regarding Ancient Egypt I will delete it.
