Tag Archives: historical textiles

Textile Cultures of Archaic Italy and Greece

24 Saturday Nov 2018

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Colour photos of a section of woolen textiles preserved as copper salts or ashes

A sample of weft-faced wool tabbies from Greece, 800 BCE-500 BCE. Note the 1 mm long red lines for scale. Photos by Margarita Gleba and Joanne Cutler published as Figure 10 in Margarita Gleba, “Tracing textile cultures of Italy and Greece in the early first millennium BC,” Antiquity 91 (2017) pp. 1205-1222 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.144

This week I had a chance to talk with Margarita Gleba about her work on Iron Age (1000-400 BCE) textiles from Spain, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria. Thousands of fragments are known, often preserved in the corrosion products on bronze grave goods such as vessels or broaches, but understanding them requires rare knowledge and expensive equipment for taking high-magnification photos, and the details are often scattered in publications which are hard to find and use different language to describe the same thing. A Cambridge History of Western Textiles had a brief section on this material which I would like to read, but publication was delayed for almost 20 years while the archaeology moved on, and until this week I did not know of any other overviews.

Most of the peoples from Britain to Afghanistan grew flax and tended sheep and used drop spindles, warp-weighted looms, and tablets to turn linen and wool into cloth, but they made different kinds of textiles in different regions. Textile technology was hard to change, because in recent cultures, girls started to learn to spin and weave as toddlers and spend much of their childhood mastering the skills (Susan M. Strawn, “Hand Spinning and Cotton in the Aztec Empire, as Revealed by the Codex Mendoza,” http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/420). It is very difficult to change a skill practised for so many years, or persuade adults to take lessons in a skill which children are supposed to master. Moreover, it was bound up with the local crops, climate, and taboos: the sheep in different areas produced wool which was good for different things, and there was a divide between cultures which wove textiles to shape and wrapped and pinned them into garments, and cultures which wove long rectangular pieces, cut them up, and sewed them into garments.
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Cross-Post: Artisans in Ancient Greece

18 Thursday Jan 2018

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Francine Blondé (ed.), L’artisanat en Grèce ancienne: filières de production: bilans, méthodes et perspectives. Archaiologia. Villeneuve-d’Ascq; Athènes: Presses universitaires du Septentrion; École française d’Athènes, 2016. Pp. 420. ISBN 9782757414767. €48.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Mills McArthur, University of Chicago (millsmcarthur@uchicago.edu)

This collection of twenty papers (two in English, the rest in French) emerges from an October 2007 round table gathering organized by l’École française d’Athènes. The theme is craft production in ancient Greece, and the majority of papers focus on one of three subjects: textile production, metalwork, or ancient glass. But this statement somewhat understates the diverse scope of the book. We also encounter papers on basket making, alum production, and the spatial organization of craft activity. Geographically, we travel as far afield as Roman Gaul. Chronologically, the papers delve as early as the Mycenaean period and extend as late as the 19th century CE.

Above all, this volume will be of value for its contributions to the study of ancient textiles, a subject that has attracted much scholarly interest in recent years. One is happy to find Marie-Louise Nosch, a leading authority, among the contributors. Her paper (pp. 157-170) promotes the use of experimental archaeology, defending this form of knowledge from the occasional charges of amateurism. The process of reconstructing ancient garments, she maintains, has the potential to address a broad range of fundamental questions, such as the duration of time required in textile manufacturing, the different techniques employed, and the difficulties encountered during production. She underscores this point with an experiment of her own, in which two experienced spinners spun thread using replica Bronze Age spindle whorls of differing weights. The findings: a skilled worker could spin an average of 50 meters of thread per hour with an 18 g spindle whorl, compared to 40 m per hour with an 8 g whorl. The lighter whorl, however, producing a finer thread, required greater concentration on the part of the spinners, implying a greater degree of skill. For Nosch, these results are an argument for putting tools front and center in the analysis of textile production. The weight of spindle whorls provides a window into the nature of ancient textile production, shedding light on the skills of workers and the type of thread produced at a given site. But exploiting such evidence, she adds, requires adopting rigorous criteria for classifying the tools consistently.

Valérie Marion (pp. 145-156) echoes Nosch’s insistence on the need for greater methodological rigor in describing artifacts of textile production. Much like Nosch’s spindle whorls, Marion sees in loom weights objects of technical precision whose value as evidence is hampered by the lack of a standardized descriptive vocabulary to classify them. The most important point about these weights is their weight — and yet, Marion states, precisely this information is all too often lacking in published inventories. For her, loom weights present an opportunity to pose questions about regional variation, and to that end she offers a case study of two Greek colonies in Thrace: Argilos and Thasos. Despite their geographical and cultural proximity, the evidence of loom weights paints a markedly different picture of textile production in these two communities, as Marion illustrates by graphing the weights’ size distribution and morphology (p. 151). Loom weights, she hopes, will become a means for identifying different technical traditions of textile production across the Greek world.

Quite apart from the tools of the trade, textiles themselves are a source of information for their own production. Some may be surprised to learn just how many ancient Greek textile fragments have been discovered (though they come almost exclusively from funerary contexts). Christophe Moulherat and Youlie Spantidaki (pp. 119-144) present several such artifacts dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period, the result of a collaboration between the Hellenic Center for Research and Conservation of Archaeological Textiles (ARTEX) and the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF). The authors describe the fragments, add a few words about archaeological context, and provide details in tabular form about the fragments’ composition, as well as supplying a number of photographs. Especially striking is a fabric from Koropi in Attica that preserves the form of several embroidered lions.2

Across these papers, one gets the impression that a relentless attentiveness to seemingly mundane artifacts of textile production — spindle whorls, loom weights, textile fragments — has great potential to move beyond an understanding of the textile industry resting predominantly on textual and iconographic evidence. …

For the rest of the review, see http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2018/2018-01-20.html. If you want that linen embroidered with a diaper pattern (intersecting diagonal lines) it is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum Number T.220 to B-1953.

Cotton from Dilmun

21 Saturday Jan 2017

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An eroded ziggurat against the background of the blue sky with bushes and depressions in the foreground

Tschoga Zanbil, the greatest surviving ziggurat in Elam (modern Khuzestan). Photo by Sean Manning, May 2016.

In Achaemenid studies, Wouter Henkelman’s book The Other Gods Who Are is famous for using some very difficult sources to argue that we should not think about Iranians replacing and subjugating Elamites, but that the ancient Persians we know were the product of hundreds of years of interaction between Iranian-speakers and Elamite-speakers sharing the highlands of Fars, so that by the time of Cyrus or Darius it was hard to say what was Iranian and what was Elamite. Elam had traditionally included both lowland Susa and highland Anšan, and by the time of Cyrus the difference between mountain and plain may have felt more real than any difference in language or religion inside one region.

As this study aims to show, the religious landscape of the Achaemenid heartland was a fascinating and variegated tapestry woven from Elamite and (Indo-)Iranian traits. It will be argued that, though heterogeneous, this landscape was nevertheless a unity that was treated as such by the administrators at Persepolis. ‘Iranian’ and ‘Elamite’ cults were not only treated alike, but were actually not separated in clearly distinct sections. The gods venerated and the cults sponsored were only so because they were considered to be Persian, i.e. as belonging to the rich intercultural milieu of first-millennium Fārs. (p. 58)

As I take my first glance through it, I find that it has other treasures:

One question that arises at this point is whether [the hoard of silverware from] Kalmākarra is an exception, or an indication of the overall level of prosperity in the period under discussion [ie. the century after the Assyrian invasions around 640 BCE]. Confirmation of the thesis that ‘Kalmākarra’ is not an exceptional case is the rich inventory of a stone burial chamber, discovered by chance in 1982 at Arǧān near Behbahān in eastern Khūzestān. The funerary deposits, in and outside of a bronze coffin, included an elaborate bronze stand (or ‘candelabrum’), a large gold ceremonial object (‘ring’), a dagger decorated with precious stones and gold filigree, a silver rod, a bronze lion beaker and a large bowl with engraved scenes. Four of the objects have an Elamite inscription reading “Kidin-Hutran, son of Kurluš.” Apart from metal objects, the tomb also contained remains of embroidered garments. The 98 gold bracteates, also found in the coffin, may have been sewn to one or several of these garments. There is now a communis opinio on the tomb’s date: the later seventh or early sixth century BC (i.e. contemporaneous with the Kalmākarra hoard and the Acropole texts).[79] The Arǧān find is of major importance for its international context. The tomb inventory displays a range of different styles and iconographic themes (Phoenician, Syrian, Elamite, Assyrian) and some objects probably reached Kidin-Hutran via long-distance trade. This is particularly true for the textiles found in the tomb, at least three of which are made of cotton – these are, in fact,among the earliest Near Eastern examples of cotton garments. As Javier Álvarez-Mon argues, maritime trade between Elam and Dilmun, where cotton was grown in this period, is the most likely source of the fabric or the raw material (Álvarez-Mon [forthc. 1]).

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Did the Greeks Wear Glued Linen Armour?

14 Friday Feb 2014

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A recent scholarly book argues that ancient Greek soldiers wore body armour of many layers of linen glued together. This would be surprising, since most cultures with linen armour sewed it together, but some people are concerned that Greek images of this armour rarely show stitch marks.* The book briefly cites two 19th century articles as evidence that such glued linen armour has been found.** Many curious readers will not be able to follow up on these references, since the necessary journals are hard to obtain outside of a large reference library, and since the articles are in Italian and German. One perk of studying in Innsbruck is that I do have access to the necessary publications, and I can read German if not Italian. I therefore spent a few hours flipping through online databases and back issues of journals with gilded titles on the spines and „königlich und kaiserlich“ in the stamps on the title page. Because many interested people do not have access to these articles, I have decided to reproduce the key passages with an English summary.
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