Origins of Bags — 2-Part Series

• Part 1: From Humanity’s First Bags to the Modern Revolution (current)
• Part 2: The Hidden Stories Behind Their Names

Origins of Bags Part 1: From Humanity’s First Bags to the Modern Revolution

In September 1991, two German hikers discovered a body frozen in the ice of the Ötztal Alps in northern Italy. At first, it was assumed to be a modern accident victim — but analysis told a completely different story. The man was a Neolithic human who had lived 5,300 years ago. Later named “Ötzi,” he was found carrying a copper axe, a quiver, and a leather pouch attached to his belt.^[1] Inside the pouch were small tools for daily survival: a flint scraper and a bone awl.

Today, 5,300 years later, people still carry bags. What changed between Ötzi’s leather pouch and the bags we hold in our hands today? Bags began as simple tools for carrying things, but over time they evolved into objects that signal social class, gender, and profession.

Humanity’s First Bags: Why They Were Needed

The reason bags came into existence is straightforward: humans began walking on two legs. Unlike four-legged animals, upright walking freed the human hands — and simultaneously created the need for something to carry objects while on the move. At first, simple pouches made from animal hides or plant fibers filled that role.^[2]

The challenge is that bags made from organic materials decompose over thousands of years. What we can know about prehistoric bags is therefore limited to exceptional cases — artifacts that survived in extraordinarily rare preservation conditions. Ötzi is one such exception.

Ötzi’s Equipment: A 5,300-Year-Old Packing List

Ötzi’s belongings reveal just how sophisticated prehistoric humans were when it came to carrying gear.^[1]

Belt pouch: A leather waist pouch containing small tools — a flint scraper and a bone awl.

Woven grass net bag: A net-style bag made from plant fibers, likely used to carry food or miscellaneous items.

U-shaped wooden frame backpack: The most remarkable item. Loads were placed on a wooden frame bent into a U-shape and carried on the back. This is considered one of the oldest known structured backpack forms in the world.

Ötzi’s belongings show that he was no simple porter. He used different bag types for different purposes, separating items he needed frequent access to from those he needed less often. 5,300 years ago, but the logic of packing is not so different from today.

Ancient Bags: From Egypt to Rome

Ancient Egypt: The Waist Pouch

Ancient Egyptian murals and artifacts depict bags in a variety of forms. Egyptians carried small pouches made of leather or linen, hung from their belts or held in hand. Pharaohs and nobles used more elaborately decorated pouches — those bearing cartouche motifs or metal fittings served to signal the wearer’s status.^[3]

Ordinary farmers and merchants, by contrast, tied simple linen sacks with cord and slung them over their shoulders or carried them by hand. Notably, in ancient Egyptian art, gods are often depicted holding pouches or jars — a sign that bags carried symbolic meaning beyond their practical function.

Ancient Rome: The Marsupium and the Loculus

Romans gave specific names to their bags. The waist pouch used to carry coins and small items was called the marsupium. This word would later become the root of the English “marsupial” — mammals that carry their young in a pouch.^[4]

Soldiers used a pack called the loculus. Roman legionnaires marching long distances loaded considerable weight into these packs and carried them on their backs. The way loads were bundled was even standardized to improve marching efficiency.^[4] This “systematic approach to load-carrying” established by the Roman army became an important precedent in the history of military bags.

Merchants used larger sacks (sacca) to transport goods, and travelers carried a shoulder bag called the pera. Rome already shows clear evidence of bags differentiating by function.

Medieval European Bags: The Golden Age of the Belt Pouch

The Girdle Purse: A Medieval Essential

Medieval Europe had no personal storage space equivalent to today’s trouser pocket — garments simply did not have built-in pockets. Instead, people used the “girdle purse,” a pouch attached to the belt. Historical records describe medieval people hanging wallets, keys, daggers, pens and ink bottles, rosaries, and even books from their belts.^[5]

The girdle purse was also a marker of status. An elaborately gilded or embroidered leather pouch belonged to the wealthy nobility, while a plainly tanned leather pouch was the kind a peasant or commoner would carry. The material and decoration of a purse communicated the wearer’s social standing at a glance.

The Almoner: A Bag for Charity

Medieval church culture also gave rise to a special type of pouch. The “almoner” was originally a small purse carried by monks or nobles to hold coins meant for distribution to the poor. The word shares its root with the English “alms,” meaning charitable giving.^[13] Far more than a storage tool, this bag was a tangible symbol of religious virtue — which is why saints in Christian art are so often depicted carrying one.

The Age of the Pocket: When Bags Moved Inside Clothing

16th–17th Centuries: The Rise of the Tie-On Pocket

The sixteenth century brought a major shift in Western European fashion. As clothing grew increasingly elaborate, “tie-on pockets” hidden beneath thick skirts came into use. These pockets were tied to the underskirt with a waistband, concealed beneath the outer skirt, but accessible through a side slit in the fabric.^[6]

The word “pocket,” derived around the fourteenth century from an Anglo-French word meaning “small bag,”^[6] originally referred to exactly this kind of separately attached small bag. These pockets were quite spacious — large enough to hold a journal, a perfume bottle, a mirror, a wallet, and sewing tools all at once. Hidden within the layers of thick skirts, they gave women a private, independent storage space.

How the French Revolution Took Away the Pocket

In 1789, the French Revolution broke out — and its reverberations reached into unexpected corners of life, including women’s fashion.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, ancient Greece and Rome became the ideals of the French republic. Beginning in the 1790s, so-called “Neoclassical” fashion swept through society. Thin, flowing dresses in white or pale colors, evoking the silhouettes of Greek goddess statues, became enormously popular.^[7] These dresses were beautiful, but they posed a structural problem: the skirts were too thin and body-hugging for a bulky tie-on pocket to be worn underneath without ruining the silhouette.

The result was the disappearance of the tie-on pocket that women had used for centuries. Women suddenly found themselves without a space to carry their belongings.

The Birth of the Reticule: The Bag That Was Mocked

“Ridiculous” — The Taunt

The solution to this problem was the “reticule.” From the Latin reticulum, meaning “small net,” the reticule began as a small bag literally woven from netting or fine fabric.^[8] Designed to be held in the hand or hung from the wrist, it spread rapidly among women in Western Europe from the early 1800s onward.

Yet the reticule was not welcomed at first. Contemporaries mocked it with a pun: the word “reticule” sounded very similar to “ridicule.”^[8] Until then, European society had found it improper for a woman to visibly carry objects by hand. The expectation was strong that storage — whether in a pocket or a pouch — should be concealed within one’s clothing. Now women were openly carrying bags in their hands, and to many observers it looked strange and absurd.

But necessity outlasts fashion trends. The reticule survived the mockery and established itself as an indispensable women’s accessory throughout the nineteenth century. Materials expanded from netting to velvet, satin, and beaded decoration. This is the direct ancestor of the modern handbag.

Pockets vs. Handbags: 200 Years of Imbalance

The emergence of the reticule marked an important turning point in fashion history — the first moment a bag separated itself from clothing and became an independent fashion item. At the same time, it entrenched a trend in which functional storage space disappeared from women’s clothing. While men’s garments retained their pockets — and indeed gained more — women’s fashion settled into a pattern where pockets either became purely decorative or vanished entirely.^[6]

This imbalance has still not been fully resolved two centuries later. The persistent complaint that “women’s trouser pockets are too small” has this historical backdrop.

The Bags Made by the Industrial Revolution and the Military

By the nineteenth century, two forces pushed the history of bags in a new direction: the mass movement of people brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the demands of war.

The Rucksack: A Word from the German Alps

The English word “rucksack” comes from German. It combines a dialectal form of Rücken (back) with Sack (sack), and first appeared in English-language records in 1866.^[9] The word spread from hikers and travelers in the Alpine region into the English-speaking world.

Of course, carrying loads on one’s back has a history of thousands of years — as Ötzi demonstrates. But the modern rucksack, a structured back-carrying bag with shoulder straps and a back panel, developed out of military necessity.^[10] Throughout the nineteenth century, European armies continuously refined the design of packs to maximize soldiers’ marching capacity.

The Duffel Bag: Named After a Belgian Town

The term “duffel bag” first appears in English records in 1915, making it relatively young — but the history behind the name stretches back to the seventeenth century.^[11] The duffel bag takes its name from the small town of Duffel in the Brabant region of Belgium. A thick, coarse woolen cloth produced in or traded through that town became known as “duffel,” and the cylindrical bag made from that cloth acquired the same name.^[11]

Originally a practical bag used by sailors and soldiers to transport large quantities of supplies, the duffel bag spread globally when Allied troops used it on a massive scale during World War II. When the war ended, surplus military duffel bags entered the civilian market, and the bag became familiar to the general public.^[11]

The Briefcase: A Bag Born in the Courtroom

The word “briefcase” first appears in English records in 1908,^[12] though the related term “brief-bag” had already been in use since 1806. The name comes from the legal term “brief” — a summary document that lawyers prepare for use in court. The flat bag used to carry these documents to the courtroom became the briefcase.^[12]

As the legal profession grew in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States, so did demand for lawyers’ bags. The flat bag that could safely hold court documents while maintaining a suitably formal appearance quickly became the symbolic carry-all not just of lawyers, but of all office workers. To carry a briefcase was to signal: “I work in an office.”^[12]

The Knapsack: A Sack for Food

No account of the military bag would be complete without the knapsack. The word comes from early-seventeenth-century Low German, combining a word meaning “to chew” or “to eat” with “sack” — its original meaning was literally “a sack for food.”^[10] Early knapsacks were used primarily to carry soldiers’ field rations during marches.

The knapsack later expanded in meaning to encompass the general marching pack and became standard equipment for armies across Europe. As the nature of nineteenth-century warfare changed, soldiers were increasingly required to travel long distances in self-sufficient fashion, driving constant innovation in the design and capacity of military bags.

What Bags Have Carried

Ötzi’s belt pouch was a tool for survival. The medieval noble’s girdle purse was a marker of status. The reticule filled the void left when pockets vanished from women’s clothing — while also becoming the first independent object a woman could openly carry outside her body. The soldier’s duffel bag and knapsack were instruments of mass movement. The lawyer’s briefcase was the badge of a new professional identity.

Bags, in this way, have been reshaped by the pressures of each era. Changes in fashion, the demands of war, and the emergence of new professions all drove the history of bags forward. And it all began with a small leather pouch worn on the belt of a man frozen in a glacier 5,300 years ago. Not what a bag holds, but who carries which bag — that is what speaks to the era.

Next: Part 2: The Hidden Stories Behind Their Names