Oddly, at least to me, these shoes, about which so little is known, and so little study done, representing a trivial population on the fringe of society, may provide vital clues to the development of footwear.
It seems apparent from what I have been told (since finding any information on these shoes is tricky at best) that by the 5th-6th centuries, the Coptic monks near Panopolis in the Akhmin nome of Egypt may have had the technology of turned work, and may have been making those shoes on lasts. They also had a variety of variations on welts (what archaeologists have been calling "rands"). Examples of their shoes and lasts are at numerous museums, including the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, and the Louvre in Paris. The dates they give for the shoes cover a wide range of dates as possible, the latest being generally the 8th or 9th C. If the latest date is correct, then the Copts did not have these far earlier than anyone else seems to. If the earlier dates are correct, then more attention should be paid to these finds.
In either case, however, they present evidence that several aspects of medieval European shoes (turnshoes, lasts, pointed toes, rands) were not developed in Europe, but may have been imports from the Middle East.
I should point out that, because of some disagreements with various scholars, for the sake of this article, I am using "turnshoe" to refer to shoes made like the Medieval turnshoe (inside out, with seams closed with a blind round closing, or what is called by archaeologists, a "flesh-edge stitch") and "turned work" to refer to any shoe made inside out, with any sort of closing.
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