The oldest flag ever found is 4,400 years old and made of bronze
Nobody knows who raised the first flag, but the oldest one yet discovered comes from Shahdad in Iran, around 2400 BC, and it is metal rather than cloth. Fabric flags came later, probably from ancient India or Zhou dynasty China, while Europe arrived at the idea on its own.
Flag-like field signs, which scholars call vexilloids, appear on Egyptian pottery from about 3500 BC, painted on the prows of ships. In war they helped armies coordinate, and famous examples include the Persian Derafsh Kaviani, the eagles of Roman legions and the Sarmatian dragon standard, which a rider carried streaming in the wind and which looked more like a long dragon-shaped kite than a banner. The Shahdad piece depicts two figures, a man sitting and a woman on her knees, turned toward one another across a star.
Cloth flags almost certainly began in Asia. Chinese banners showed animals, among them a blue dragon, a red bird and a white tiger, and a royal flag was owed respect close to that due to the ruler himself. Indian flags tended to be triangular, trimmed with a yak's tail and a parasol of state. Silk flags later turn up often in accounts of early Islam, though whether the idea travelled from China or only the silk did is unclear.
Europe's tradition grew independently from the Roman vexillum, the only cloth flag the Romans used, which served as cavalry, signal and imperial standard. Constantine's Christian labarum of the fourth century was a version of it. Medieval flags multiplied around heraldry, kings, cities, guilds and ships; in English usage a pennon was a knight's lance flag and a banner carried its owner's arms.
From the early seventeenth century, ships were expected, and later legally required, to fly flags showing nationality, and signal flags became the main way of talking at sea. Flying flags on land for the nation as a whole spread with nationalism toward the end of the eighteenth century. The study of all this is vexillology, from the Latin word for banner, and it groups designs into families that reveal shared history or influence.
Source: Flag
