Women used to (and still do) use a variety of things to absorb their menstrual flow. It makes sense that they used whatever was handy and plentiful, things like puffy wool, loose cotton, moss, special cloths or old rags, dried grasses or soft vegetable fibers. All of these materials could be stuffed in a kind of envelope worn between the legs. Some cultures believe that menstrual blood should return to the earth, and so women don't use anything, but perhaps bleed into a special spot.
Close fitting underwear are a pretty recent invention: women used to wear bloomers or nothing at all under their many skirts and underskirts, so they attached their menstrual cloths to belts worn around their waist and under clothing. These belts continued to be used in combination with disposable pads until at least the 1970's, when the pads started to be made with sticky stuff on their backs.
Disposable pads were discovered by nurses during World War I, when they figured out that the absorbant bandaging they were using on their patients worked really well for their periods too. The first disposable napkins were sold in 1921.
Tampons were "invented" in the 1930's. That is, at that time they started to be manufactured commercially and sold world-wide. But women in ancient Japan wore tampons made of paper, and women in Indonesia made tampons of vegetable fiber.