Red cloth to protect the living and dead

Colouring linen, and later wool, red in ancient Egypt seems first to have been done using red ochre. From around 1500 B.C. madder seemed to become increasingly common as a red colourant.  

Colouring the dead with the mineral red ochre (iron oxide) was not confined to Egypt but seems a common practice cross-culturally. Use of ochre goes back over 300,000 years and the substance was used by Neanderthals as well as our closer ancestors. In Wales we have the 'Red Lady of Paviland', a male burial found covered with ochre, dating to around 3300 BC.C.. Of course, it could be that past societies also made use of red ochre in everyday life but there is less evidence for it. Today, ochre is still used by some groups of people to adorn the hair and body.

In Ancient Egypt

Ochre occurs naturally in Egypt in the Oases of the Western Desert, and in areas around Aswan. 

In burials of the predynastic period, palettes for grinding pigments are found on both burial and settlement sites. Perversely, perhaps, green malachite seems to have been the most common pigment used for burials, while ochre was mainly found on palettes from settlements (Baduel 2008).  Fifth millennium graves from Badari contained chunks of red ochre and fourth millennium period graves from Bhutto in lower Egypt were part covered in ochre. A burial at Hierakonpolis dating to 3650-3500 B.C. contained, among other items, junks of black galena used as eye pigment but also chunks of ochre. Another elite burial contained cloth pigmented with iron oxide (Jones 2002).

In the Old Kingdom (2700-2200 B.C.) the use of ochre continued, with red cloth being used for mummy wrappings. Analysis shows red ochre was also used in the 12th Dynasty (c.1800 B.C.) to dye linen (Wouters 1990). It was used, for example on the  red mummy wrappings of Khenmit and Ita at Dashur. Iron oxide was also used to dye votive animal mummy wrappings of 3rd century B.C. to the 3rd century AD (Tamburini et al. 2001). [Although I have used the term 'dye', the term 'pigment' may be more apt for mineral colourants. Mineral colourants do not dissolve in water or form molecular bonds with the fabric].

As well as being used to colour linen, the ancient Egyptians also used red ochre to colour paints (for tomb, temple and other painting), as a medicine to help with eye ailments, to paint images on pottery, and to write on papyrus. Coffins and shrouds were frequently coloured red throughout the Dynastic Period.

The use of red continued beyond the New Kingdom, though from around 1500 B.C. madder and tannin frequently replaced iron oxides to colour textiles red, though iron oxide has certainly been found in votive animal mummies of the Roman Period. Use of madder to colour red, may have been introduced from the Levant.

In the New Kingdom, coloured linen seems to have been used by the elite, but here cloth was not only coloured red, but also blue and yellow. For example, Howard Carter found four pieces of coloured cloth from the tomb of Tuthmosis IV (left). Although I say he found them, the actual discovery was made by a dog! Rosalind Janssen (1992, 218) quotes Howard Carter: "I must, however, admit that the original discoverer of the first piece of tapestry-weaving was an inquisitive pariah-puppy, of inborn excavating tendencies. Amid a mass of rubbish were tattered fragments of mummy linen; amongst these the puppy suddenly became active, and after a bout of foraging seized a piece of linen and ran away in triumph with his prize. I pursued him and rescued what I discovered to be a piece of tapestry-woven fabric, which immediately suggested a further search".

There were also several dyed linen pieces from the tomb of Tutankhamun, probably dyed with woad and madder. However, the use of ochre continued. A few pieces from Amarna were coloured with iron oxide rather than madder (Kemp and Vogelsang-Eastwood, 2001, 153-154).

Madder used with alum and/or tannin may have been preferred because it was more colour fast when washed repeatedly. However, colouring cloth with minerals can have some advantages. Indeed, minerals are still sometimes used today to colour textiles, for example the famous mud cloth of Africa or the Bengala mud dyes. They can have the advantage of other dyes in being usable cold and, as mordants are not used, they have a low environmental impact. Iron oxides are colour fast and while they can be washed out of fabrics, it is not easily done. It is possible too that some sort of glue, such as milk, was used to help the mineral stick to the cloth. However, mineral pigments can cause textiles to decay. In the case of linen, however, such decay appears slow, with wool it is quicker. The later use of wool may have accelerated the preference for madder of ochre as a textile colourant.

EC116, from the Egypt Centre, is just one of thousands of (madder) red-dyed shrouds of the Roman Period in museums across the world. It is part of the long Egyptian tradition of dyeing funerary cloth red.

Red was the colour of the sun-god Re and rebirth, it was associated with dangerous beings but was also associated with life and with protection. Red cloth was given as a daily offering to the gods. Indeed, as late the fourth to seventh centuries AD, Egyptian linen textiles sometimes included seemingly stray red threads, almost hidden, which Rooijakkers (2017) has seen as protective.

References

Baduel, N. 2008. Tegumentary paint and cosmetic palettes in Predynastic Egypt: Impact of those artefacts on the birth of the monarchy. In Egypt at its origins 2: Proceedings of the international conference "Origin of the State, Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt," Toulouse (France), 5th - 8th September 2005, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 172. Eds. Béatrix Midant-Reynes, and Yann Tristant, pp. 1057-1090.

Janssen, 1992. The Ceremonial Garments of Tuthmosis III Reconsidered. Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur, 19 (1992), pp. 217-224.

Jones, J. 2002. Funeral Textiles of the Rich and Poor. Nekhen News, 14, p13.

Kemp, B.J. and Vogelsang-Eastwood, G.  2001. The Ancient Textile Industry at Amarna. The Egypt Exploration Society.

Rooijakkers, T. 2017. Tracing the Red Thread. In Excavating, Analysing, Reconstructing: Textiles of the First Millennium AD from Egypt and Neighbouring Countries. Proceedings of the 9th conference of the research group 'Textiles from the Nile Valley', Antwerp, 27-29 November 2015. Eds. de Moor, A, Fluck, C. and Linscheid, P. Lanoon, pp. 242-251.

Tamburini, D, Dyer, J., Vandenbeusch, M. et al.  2021. A multi-scalar investigation of the colouring materials used in textile wrappings of Egyptian votive animal mummies, Heritage Science https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-021-00585-2.

Wouters, J. 1990. The Identification of Haematite as a Red Colorant on an Egyptian Textile from the Second Millenium B.C. Studies in Conservation, 35, pp. 89-92.

Warping the loom in ancient Egypt

The picture on the left is the theme for today's blog.

Last week, I blogged about the ground looms used by ancient Egyptians. This week consideration is given to how they warped the loom, that is, how were the longitudinal fibres put on the loom. Modern weavers using simple looms tend to use two different methods: direct warping where the thread is would backwards and forwards around two parallel beams, or often an indirect method is used there the weaver winds the length of thread between poles/pegs and then transfers it to the loom. Because of the number of warp threads per centimeter is estimated as 30 on average, it has been suggested it would have taken about 3 days to warp the loom.

A video of modern direct warping of a simple loom can be seen here:

https://youtu.be/6OY17Kjo5dc?t=312

You can see modern weavers using warping pegs here:

https://youtu.be/IyOSwtY-Gnk?t=85

https://youtu.be/R2JlgXorWeg

Pegs can be hammered into the ground, put on a frame or into a wall.

It seems likely that in ancient Egypt different methods were used at different times and places. However, there is evidence of indirect warping.

To the left is a model of a weavers workshop from the tomb of Mekhetre. I've showed this image before in other posts. It dates to around 1980BC. On the left in the picture you can see pegs stuck into the wall. It has been suggested that these are warping pegs. The first picture on this page shows a close up of the warping section.

There are also one or two tomb depictions which have been seen as warping tough they are difficult to interpret.

For example, below is a scene from the tomb of Nefer-Renpet from around 1200 BC. It has been suggested that the vertical forked sticks are warping pegs.

Peet and Woolly in their report on the Workmen's Village at Amarna claimed that the several pegs found in houses were warping pegs (COA I, 55).

As you can see by the videos above, warping pegs are not confined to ancient societies. Below is a depiction of the laying out of a warp in a wall in modern Egypt (with apologies as I don't know where I got the picture!).

Further Reading

Kemp, B.J. and Vogelsang-Eastwood, G. 2001. The Ancient Textile Industry at Amarna, The Egypt Exploration Society, pp.314-322.

Peet, T. E. and Woolly, C.L. 1923. The City of Akhenaten, Part I, Excavations of 1921 and 1922 at el-Amarneh. The Egypt Exploration Society.

Ancient Egyptian Ground Looms

I've been practising some very basic weaving, really basic, I'm a beginner, so been thinking what can be possible on a very simple loom. I know back-strap looms can be used to make some really outstanding pieces, but the ancient Egyptians, for much of their history, used a ground loom on which they wove linen. 

Model of a weaving workshop from the tomb of Mekhetre (c.2000 BC). On the left wall it looks like women are using warp pegs stuck in the wall and centre you can see the ground loom.

Right: A ground loom of the early 20th century.

Four pegs are hammered into the ground, sticks are attached at one short ends and the warp threads strung between the sticks. Alternate warp threads are lifted up and down by means of another stick to which thread heddles are attached and the weft passed between them.

You can get an idea of how such a loom works in this video. 

Such looms appear to have been used from very early on in ancient Egypt. Here is a depiction of an early example on a piece of pottery from the Petrie Museum. It dates to c. 3600 BC.

The loom is the rectangular shape and depicted at the bottom of the vessel. The weaver would have sat at the foot end of the loom (the right in the picture) and the depiction shows that a start had been made to weaving (right in the picture, the end nearest where the weaver would have sat). If you look closely you may see that the bottom right of the loom in the depiction (this would have been bottom left for the weaver) has some strange 'extensions'.

These would have been caused by the weft threads being quite short, so that they would only pass under and over the warp threads for a few widths of the fabric. This would result in a fringed left edge. Such fringes appear to have been left and used as a decorative feature on the final cloth.

Here is the famous Tarkhan dress from the Petrie Museum, c3200BC. On the wearer's left you can see the weft thread showing underneath the arm.

In later periods, the weft was longer but the use of the decorative fringe was still desirable. Often, a separately made fringe piece was deliberately added to the garment to emulate the short weft effect.

From around 1500 BC, vertical looms came into use. The ground loom was still used,though with less frequency. 

It amazes me that the ancients were able to weave such fine weaves on such looms. Some royal linens achieved a count of 60 threads per centimeter though more common counts were 20-50 threads a cm (Kemp and Vogelsang-Eastwood, 2001, pp100-103).

Kemp, B. J. and Vogelsang-Eastwood, G. 2001. The Ancient Textile Industry at Amarna. The Egypt Exploration Society.

Spitting on linen

In the last post I looked at making singles of linen for plying. Plying involves twisting two or more single strands of fibre together to make the yarn stronger. And in a post, long ago, I explored twizzling that whirl to ply and looked at different whirl types. But is there anything more we can say about plying?

Well, in ancient Egypt, and other countries in the ancient near east, there were these things (left). They are usually made of pottery, are bowl-shaped and have an internal 'handle' or loop.

The first two pictured here are from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (above is 15.3.99). The one above is actually made of limestone and was found in a grave (sometimes items found in graves which were normally made from pottery are made of stone- permanence for eternity).

These are commonly called spinning bowls. Many date to the Middle Kingdom (2400-1782 BC), but there are similar items from Tell el-Farkha which date to c. 3000 BC, and others like the one on the left are more modern. Those from Tell el-Farkha have grooves on the undersides of the loops. 

Such items are commonly said to have held balls of linen yarn with the thread travelling under an internal loop and then out. They may have been used for keeping spliced singles of linen taught for plying.

Barber, referencing Tsoboi, also shows this illustration used in the manufacture of nettle fibre in Japan in the early 1980s.

As you can see it was described as a wetting bowl. It was important to keep the nettle damp when it was spun. So, the bowl contained a ball of nettle fibre and water. Again, it is possible that the ancient Egyptians used their similar bowls to keep fibre wet.

There is more than one reason why one might want to ply wet. Firstly, it helps make sure the spliced strands stick together. Spinning flax wet also makes it easier to get a smooth finish to the thread, rather than a hairy one. Finally, linen is stronger wet than dry, allowing it to hold together more, especially if one wants to put a string twist in the ply. Ancient Egyptian yarns seem often to have had a high level of twist. A high level of twist is also important in natural pleating, a method probably used by the ancients. You can see a video explaining natural pleating here.

Indeed, modern spinners will wet their hands with water or spittle to keep the fibre moist. Wheels used for spinning flax often had a container of water on them, or the water might be kept by the wheel. Furthermore, it is said that saliva may be better than water as it contains an enzyme, amylase, which dissolves the starch in flax and then when the starch dries it forms a stronger bond. In this video you can see women in the Pyrenees eating sloe berries prior to spinning hemp to help the production of saliva.

There is also a Grimms fairy tale about three sisters who were spinsters. One had a foot made large from treadling, another had a large thumb from twisting the fibre and the third had a huge lip which hung down to her chest from constantly wetting the flax thread. You can see them here. 

But, returning to the spinning bowl, as well as water, the bowls may have held size to further strengthen the thread and to keep the thread smooth. These two factors would have been particularly important if the thread was used for warping a loom. The warp threads are those which are held under tension and can also be subject to the constant beating used in placing weft threads. The latter can abrade them. Size can be made of starch boiled to make a paste, it can be made of gelatine, and also from boiled flax seeds.

Further Reading

Barber E. G. 1991. Prehistoric textiles: The development of cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with special reference to the Aegean, Princeton and Oxford, (p. 73. Refers to Japanese bowls).

Dothan, T. 1963. Spinning Bowls, Israel Exploration Journal , Vol. 13, No. 2 (1963), pp. 97-112.

Richards, A. 2020. Weaving Textiles that Shape Themselves, Ramsbury, 44-46.

Spinazzi-Lucchesi, C. 2020 ‘A Reassessment of Spinning Bowls. New evidence from Egypt and the Levant’. Iamoni, M (ed.) From the Prehistory of Upper Mesopotamia to the Bronze and Iron Age Societies of the Levant. Volume 1  271-279.

https://www.openstarts.units.it/bitstream/10077/30217/1/17_W%26E_2_BH5_I_online.pdf

Splicing and plying again

 Way back in summer 2021, I did a post on splicing, you can read it here.

Then later the same year I did a series of talks exploring textiles in ancient Egypt. One of the sessions was on splicing and plying. It's usually believed that the Egyptians didn't join two pieces of yarn to make a single thread by spinning them together. Rather, they overlapped two pieces and twisted them together. Then, when strong warp threads were required for weaving two spiced threads may be plied together. There is more in my previous blog post and in the papers below. This happened throughout the dynastic period.

So here we have some spliced fibres from Lahun which are now in the Petrie Museum. They date from 1759-1850 BC.

Kate de Buriatte, who attended the sessions tried out an experiment, which I thought I'd share with you. Looking at depictions of linen production in ancient Egypt, and with actual hands-on experiments, Kate, who is an experienced spinner, suggested that what is going on in the scene below, for example, from the tomb of Dagi, is not quite what Egyptologists assumed. But rather that the woman second from the left is rolling two pieces of flax on a stone. She is splicing, but the little hump shown isn't a heap of fibre, but is a stone on which she is rolling strips of fibre.

The woman on the right with raised leg is plying two pieces together.

And below is a depiction of a weaving workshop from the tomb of Mekhetre. Noted the seated women on the left.

Kate's suggestion seems very plausible to me.

We also discussed how splicing could be made easier if the linen was in its green state, and/or if a spinning bowl was used to keep it wet, and/or if the yarn was passed through a size.

Splicing fibre used in weaving would show areas of minimal twist in some areas and high twist in other, and this is indeed what we see.

The picture on the right is a piece of Egyptian textile which I have taken from Gleba and Harris.

References and useful information

Gleba, M. and Harris, S. 2018. ‘The first plant bast fibre technology: identifying splicing in archaeological textiles’, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2019) 11:2329–2346.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-018-0677-8.

Pointer, Sally. YouTube video on nettles and splicing  onwards for splicing (but the whole video is good) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Eq7fyLMu9I 13.37

Did Tutankhamun wear socks with sandals?

This week I have been largely distracted by socks.

I rather like making socks myself, then I saw this lecture by Anne Marie Decker and got totally distracted. Anne also has a blog with useful information here.

What a lot of interesting and pretty examples. The ones made for children, Anne states, are the most colourful. 

Child's sock dyed with madder, woad and weld. A left-foot sock. Found in Antinopolis (el-Minya), dated c300 AD. British Museum EA53193

They are not knit but made by making loops with a needle with eye, nalbinding. A video on the technique can be seen here. Note that these are two-toed to accommodate the wearing of sandals.

But when were the earliest Egyptian socks worn? There are probable socks from the tomb of Tutankhamun, though others believe they were riding gauntlets.(1). I tend to go with Vogelsang-Eastwood and believe they are socks. She believes that the socks were part of a charioteer's clothing and may have been a gift from Mitanni (northern Syria). The socks are made from woven linen with a fine linen inside and a coarser one outside. They have ties at the ankle. I'm afraid I couldn't find a copyright free picture but you could google them to see.

The earliest unequivocal ancient Egyptian socks date to the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD, that is the period during which the Romans had conquered Egypt. These were usually made using nalbinding technology though a slip-stitch crochet example is known:

Slip-stitch crochet sock, George Washington Textile Museum 73.719

A google search suggests that the first mention of socks was by the Greek poet Hesiod in the 8th century BC. In his poem Works and Days (536), he writes:

As for your feet, fasten onto them tight-fitting boots made from the hide of a slaughtered ox. Make them snug with felt on the inside.

 

Most of these Roman Egyptian examples are made of wool but a linen example has even been found.

Linen sock, George Washington Museum 73.714

I really like some of the even later examples, the Islamic Period ones like these. They may well be knitted. The earliest knitted examples date from the 11th century AD onwards.

George Washington Textile Museum. 73.619. The Kufic script repeats the name of Allah. 

Cooper Hewitt Collection. Again, the Kufic script repeats the name of Allah,

Socks are not the only way to keep your feet warm. You could wear footwraps. These were used by several groups, including Russian armies, up until the mid 20th century and later. I wonder if some of the squares of linen found in Egyptian Museums might be footwraps?

If you think they look odd (like I did) remember, that two-toed or tabi socks are still worn today. Here are a couple of examples. Perfect for wearing with thong-sandals.

Another great talk here:

Talk by Barbara Köstner on socks from the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

--------------

1. Willeke Wendrich and Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, Footwear, In Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood (ed.) 1999. Tutankhamun's Wardrobe: Garments from the Tomb of Tutankhamun, Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn and Co's Uitgeversmaatschappij, 68-77; Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, Socks, In  André J. Veldmeijer (ed.) 2011. Tutankhamun's Footwear. Studies of Ancient Egyptian Footwear, Sidestone Press, 165-168.

Eight-pointed Star (Octagram)

 

The eight-pointed star is a common design on Egyptian textiles from the 4^th century AD, often composed of two superimposed squares combined with interlace ornament. We have several in the Egypt Centre.

In Egypt, the motif may date from the 2^nd century AD, as is shown by a mummy portraits from Antinoe. [i] Pharaonic Egyptians depicted a five-pointed star.

If you google it, you will see all sorts of ideas on the meaning behind the eight-pointed star, from a symbol of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar (who equates with the Greek Aphrodite), the eight deities of the Egyptian Ogdoad to a Masonic symbol. An eight pointed star is also used as a rub el hisb (Arabic, quarter-group), an ornament used to mark the end of passages in the Q’uran. It seems to have been used by several different cultures in different ways around the world. For information on its various uses see: https://lds-studies.blogspot.com/2011/05/seal-of-melchizedek-eight-pointed-star.html.

It seems most likely, given the dating, that in Egypt the design was copied from Roman motifs. The star features, for example, on the 3^rd century Vichten mosaic, shown on the left here. Such designs were later reused in Islamic geometric art.

On late Roman/Byzantine/Coptic clothing such as that in the Egypt Centre, the combination of the star with the vine leaf is common, perhaps an influence of Graeco-Roman Dionysian motifs.

---

[i]Les Portraits D'Antinoe Au Musee Guimet, Emile Etienne Guimet (Librairie Hachette et Cie, Paris, France, 1912), Plate XLVI. (I am unclear if the date is correct).

High Whorl or Low Whorl?

A drop spindle tends to be a simple device, though there are variations. One of the most obvious differences is in how far the weight, the whorl, is placed in relation to the spindle stich. At top or at the bottom. The picture on the right comes from the modern spinning magazine Spin-Off which explains that using either is often a matter of personal preference but generally the low whorl is easier for beginners. Low whorls have been traditionally used in the north and west of Europe.

However, iconography and actual finds (1) shows us that the ancient Egyptians preferred the high whorl on their spindles. That is, the weight was at the top of the whorl and not the bottom. Generally, one starts these spinning by twirling them against ones thigh:

You tube videos show spinning using a modern high whorl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s99KZZOZ4q4

Was there any reason for the high whorl preference other than simple following of tradition?

Well, my hand spinning is pretty bad, and I prefer the Turkish spindle, which is slightly different again. So what do modern spinners say about the high whorl?

They are ideal for thin and fine fibres. But then they are spinning and not plying, the figures here are plying. See here for an explanation of why I think that.

You might notice that of you look at the items the Egypt Centre has catalogued as whorls, they are made of clay, or stone, whereas the examples from other collections are wooden. Maybe ours are late, or not Egyptian?

And, related to this, Sam Powell, drew my attention to this figure in the Egypt Centre collection, W668:

Is he lifting her leg to ply on a high whorl spindle, like this depiction here from Beni Hasan:

1. A Roman Period wooden spindle and whorl now in the National Museum of Scotland can be seen here.

1850-1750BC and 1550-1069BC from Lahun and Gurob can be seen in the Petrie Museum.

Woad, not just for Celts!

Yes, the ancient Egyptians used it too!

I have long wanted to dye with woad, having heard about how fabric soaked in woad changes colour when taken out of the dye vat. And, having tried it, it is rather magical. As you lift it out of the liquid, the yarn or fabric turns blue as it hits the air. The colour produced is, well, indigo, the same colour as indigo dyed jeans. (To the left is a pic of wool dyed with woad drying in my back garden). Woad and indigo actually have the same chemical dye, though indigo has it in greater quantities.

Dyeing is like magic, so it is apt that papyri from ancient Egypt dealing with dyes are sometimes called alchemic texts. Papyrus X Leidensis of the Roman Period also has recipes for changing the colour of stones and metals.1

The only problem with woad dying is that it's a bit smelly. I dye in the kitchen but have the backdoor open. Indeed Papyrus Anastasia VII has a section in it declaring "The fingers of the dyer smell of rotten fish. His eyes are red from fatigue". 2 The use of woad as a dye requires the use of a fermentation vat. Traditionally, stale urine was used. Fermentation removes oxygen from the woad, making it soluable. Instructions on how to do it are given here.

Woad, comes from the plant Isatis tinctoria L. which grows widely, including in Egypt and Britain. I am trying to grow some in my garden, but slugs keep eating it!

PS, in September I am hoping to start a once a week, 10 week exploration of ancient Egyptian textiles which I hope others might like to join. We shall be looking at various aspects of textiles, including those in the Egypt Centre, and the intention is to have an experimental element. I anyone wants to keep in touch re. this, please email me at c.a.graves-brown@swansea.ac.uk

1. There were, and are, of course arguments as to what alchemy was/is. More recently, it seems to be associated with making precious metals, or is seen as the forerunner to chemistry. For a discussion on the connection between alchemy and dyeing see: Garcia, J. M. 2018. 'The art of dyeing in Greco-Roman Egypt', in Busana, M.S., Gleba, M., Meo. F and Tricomi, A.R. (eds.) Textiles and Dyes in the Mediterranean Economy and Society. Proceedings of the VIth International Symposium on Textiles and Dyes in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Padova - Este - Altino, Italy 17 – 20 October 2016). Libros Portico, 471-479.

2. 'The Satire of the Trades'. It should be pointed out that some scholars see this text as referring not to woad dye but rather Tyrian purple dye, a dye produces from shellfish. However, analysis of purple dyes in Egypt show little use of Tyrian purple. Rather, purple dyes were more commonly obtained by overdyeing blue woad with red madder. The Papyrus dates to the 19th Dynasty.

No Lasting Colour Without Alum

Why didn't the ancient Egyptians commonly dye their most often used textile, linen?1 I can't answer that here, but thinking through possibilities, it is said in some publications that linen was harder to dye. This has always seemed unlikely to me. I can dye linen and I'm no expert. Yes, wool more readily takes up the dye but it seems difficult to believe that the ancient Egyptians did not dye linen because it was a little more difficult than wool. Secondly, woad can be used to dye linen blue without the use of a mordant. And, linen has often been dyed with woad, for example labourers' linen smocks of the 19th century were dyed with woad. Woad was used and grown in ancient Egypt. Though using only blue dye is a bit limiting colourwise, unless one is happy with the all-over jean look (tradionally jeans are dyed with indigo, chemically the same as woad). I will look a bit more at woad in the next blog post.

The beautiful vibrant colours of 'Coptic' Egyptian textiles of wool and linen owe themselves not only to the dyes but the mordant (fixative) which ensured that colour did not simply wash out of wool. The wool was dyed whereas the linen was usually left undyed. The word mordant means (bite) and so the colours "bite" and stay fast. In ancient times, as today, alum was commonly used as a wool mordant. Recipes of the time state that wool needed to be washed and then treated with a mordant before the dyeing process. The mordant was alum. In the dyeing process, the mordant is vital, and sometimes more difficult to obtain than the dyes themselves.

Top, alum mines 

Bottom, handspun linen thread dyed by the author using madder mordanted with tannin (from brewers supplies) and aluminium sulphate, and then washed. As can be seen it did fix, it doesn't wash out. However, it hasn't penetrated the thread near the knot. Wool tends to take up dyes more easily. 

But why wasn't alum used for linen? It is possible that alum was hard to get hold of, though by the 1st century AD, when the Coptic textiles were produced, their bright coloured dyed wools suggest that this was not the case.

Alum only occurs as a natural mineral in a few restricted regions. Luckily for Egypt, it was possible to obtain the mineral within the country. Several alum mines have been identified in the western deserts of Egypt; in the Great Oasis at Dakhla and Kharga, and the Small Oasis at Bahariya. These appear as shallow hollows. A specific type of alum was also used to produce a blue pigment in glass making and glazes from the New Kingdom. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, states that Egyptian alum was highly prized in the Roman world and exported and used as a dye mordant, though Pliny states that it was a wool mordant. 2.

Why was it not used for linen?

Perhaps the important alum resource was deliberately restricted by the government? Alum mines were so valuable that in Roman times they were government controlled. It is not clear if this was the case earlier, but we know that other forms of mining came under royal control before the Roman Period.

Around 2,500 BC, we can see that linen was produced in small factories or workshops. By 1500, if not earlier, it seems that there was a great deal of domestic production with the women of the house heavily engaged in this. Unless wealthy, with connections to the royal family, perhaps they did not have access to alum? It does seem that most of the extant dyed linen comes from royal contexts (Goyon 1996). 

Against the idea that linen was not dyed because alum was restricted, the colours of 'Coptic' Egyptian textiles of the 1st millennium AD show that when given the choice, linen was left plain and only the wool was dyed. But, the amount of colour does not suggest a huge alum shortage. Perhaps, indeed, the difficulty of dyeing linen meant it was usually left plain.

There are alternative suggestions. Perhaps the alum mined in Egypt was the wrong type to be used as a mordant for linen. Alum has several uses and as well as its use as a mordant, it can also be used for tanning leather, as a medicine, and, as stated above, one of the types of alum from with Egypt (cobaltiferous alum) was used to colour glass. Today's dyers of linen tend to use aluminium acetate (it can be bought online), though tannin with aluminium sulphate can be used (see image above). Now the paper by Bogenspeger, below, is great with lots of detail, but perhaps because I'm not a chemist, I'm not sure what types of alum were available within Egypt. Cardon (2007, 21-23) says the type of alum found in Egypt is a hydrated sulphate of potassium and aluminium. Is this the same as the aluminium sulphate one can by from modern dyer's supplies? If anyone can help me out, I'd be grateful. Perhaps the alum which I had used to dye linen is not really so accessible in Egypt and to use other types of alum for linen really was more difficult.

And other suggestions as to why linen wasn't commonly dyed, maybe the Egyptians simply preferred the look of the plain material, and, it had associations of divinity and purity. The ancient Egyptian could appear a very conservative lot, unwilling to change. But, if it works and has important connotations for you why change? 

1. Linen was dyed, for example, linen used to wrap mummies was not infrequently dyed red, and several dyed textiles have been found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. According to Pliny, in the 4th century BC, the generals of Alexander the Great competed in dyeing the sails of their ships. Of course this may have simply been a fanciful story and it is clear that the dyeing of linen was not common. See Goyon 1996.

2. Chapter 52 in his 35th book of his Natural History lists alum uses as: wool dyeing, leather tawing, leather tanning, for creating special metal and glass finishes, for medicinal and cosmetic uses. According to Pliny, alum, ‘… has the effect, also, of checking and dispersing perspiration, and of neutralizing offensive odours of the arm-pits.’

References and Further Reading

Bogensperger, I. 2018. 'Alum in Ancient Egypt: The written evidence', in Antoine De Moor, Cäcilia Fluck and Petra Linscheid (eds.), Excavating, analysing, reconstructing Textiles of the 1st millennium AD from Egypt and neighbouring countries. Proceedings of the 9th conference of the research group ‘Textiles from the Nile Valley’ Antwerp, 27–29 November 2015. Tielt: Lannoo Publishers. pp. 255-263. This can be downloaded from here: https://www.academia.edu/40968832/Alum_in_Ancient_Egypt_The_written_evidence (accessed July 2021).

Cardon, D.2007. Natural Dyes. Sources, Tradition, Technology and Science. London: Archetype Publications.

Goyon, J.-C. 1996 “Le lin et sa teinture en Égypte. Des procédés ancestraux aux pratiques importées (VIIe siècle av. J.-C. à l’époque récente)”, in Aspects de l’artisanat du textile dans le Monde Méditerranéen (Égypte, Grèce, monde Romain). Collection de l’Institut d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Antiquité, Université Lumière Lyon 2, vol. 2, Lyon, p. 13-22

The thread of life, women and textiles

 

Archaeologists have historically divided time into the ages of "hard technology" with such terms as “Stone Age”, “Bronze Age” and “Iron Age”. These technologies, it is claimed were fundamental to human ‘progression’. Of course, Egyptologists have seen kings and dynasties as more important and so use these to break up periods of time.[1]

But, what if we explore replacing the three age division of stone, bronze and iron to: something like the ages of “pottery” and “flax”?[2] An interesting idea. But just how important were textiles? Here I only look at ancient Egypt.

We know that textiles were used for clothing, furnishings burial wrappings, votive offerings, sails, and much more. Linen was important in the deification of the deceased and the gods carry cloth reinforcing that idea. Wages were paid in food, but also in metalwork and textiles. Textiles kept the Egyptians warm, were important in religion, allowed them to sail the Nile, were used as items of prestige and social display. Cloth was valuable, mended and re-mended.

Amulet (c. 4cm high showing Imsety holding a piece of cloth. Egypt Centre collection PM7).

There is evidence that the Egyptians themselves recognized the importance of textiles. Hella Küllmer has written on the phenomenon of women of early Bronze Age Egypt being rewarded for their weaving.[3]The hieroglyph for weaver, which represents a sceptre, designates the weaver as ‘one who is adorned’ or ‘rewarded’ and suggests the high status of weavers. Women are shown being given costly ornaments for their services, something which does not appear in later representations. It has been claimed  that the depictions of women weavers receiving necklaces were a public recognition of their worth, and furthermore  that the payment of weavers can be equated to payment given to  tomb workers of this date. 

Tomb of Akhethotep. In the second and third sections down, women weavers are rewarded with necklaces for their work, 2400-2300BC (see Junkeriza V: Die Mastaba des Snb (Seneb) und die umliegenden  figs. 8-12) 

Women engaged in such activities would have had a certain amount of financial independence and thus have been more able to build their own tombs. Even in domestic production. Around 1900, a male head of a household, Heqanakht, was able to rent fields with income from cloth woven in his household and presumably also supply the household with cloth.[3] Around 1500BC, one woman accumulated enough surplus to buy goods such as slaves.[4]

But, we don’t usually think of textiles as being central to historic development. Could this be because, before c.1300BC, it was women of ancient Egypt who tended to do most of the spinning and weaving? Around this date the vertical loom, a more complex affair than the horizontal loom, was introduced. Years of practice manipulating warp and weft in using the horizontal loom gave way to more emphasis on controlling a machine. Arguably, the new did not make fancy weaving more possible, but rather made it a little easier. Women did use these new looms, but men were now introduced into the weaving process.

In many societies textile production has been the female preserve, particularly spinning, less so weaving. The world over, deities associated with spinning and weaving have been female. And, traditionally, women's work is not so valued as that of men; though rewards such as those given to female weavers discussed above, show it was not always so.

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb shows us Howard Carter disappointed that a certain casket contained not rolls of papyri but linen; that opening the king's sarcophagus was at first disappointing because the body was shrouded in linen.[6] Ancient Egyptian tomb robbers, however, frequently took the expensive linen from tombs. And in the tomb of Tutankhamun, statues, as well as the mummy were made sacred with mummy wrappings.

---

[1] Yes, time is a continuum, but we often have to use a name to refer to a period so that other people know what we mean.

[2] https://lithub.com/what-if-we-called-it-the-flax-age-instead-of-the-iron-age/?fbclid=IwAR1_Ey5fEROYzvHRtdPV-K5sCJQrKOoC-2eDg1l5ND_zri9Bi89R6BYPxoA

[3] Küllmer, H. (2007), ‘Marktfrauen, Priesterinnen und, Edle des Königs’ Untersuchung über die Position von Frauen in der sozialen Hierarchie des Alten Ägypten bis zum Ende der 1. Zwischenzeit’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Hamburg.

[4] Wente, E.F. (1990), Letters from Ancient Egypt. Atlanta: Scholars Press. pp. 58–9. 

[5] Eyre, C.J. (1998), 'The market women of pharaonic Egypt', in Grimal, N. and Menu, P. (eds), Le commerce en Égypte anciene. Cairo: Imprimerie de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, pp. 173–92.8, 178.

[6] St Clair, K. (2019), The Golden Thread. How fabric changed history. London: John Murray. pp. 37–39.

 

Not spinning but splicing

As a person with little knowledge of textiles, but learning about them, I had assumed that the pictures such as that shown above, from a Middle Kingdom tomb at Beni Hasan (c.1900BC), showed the person on the right spinning linen from flax fibres. There are quite a few scenes of spinning using spindles in the pharaonic period. In more modern times, in spinning flax, the fibre is separated from the plant and then the strands of fibre spun together to form a "single". In order to strengthen the thread, two singles are then plied together. What is happening here, as in most other pharaonic spinning scenes is the plying of two already created singles. The person on the right holds two threads from two bowls, plying them together to make a stronger thread.

Spinning single threads does not seem to have happened at this date. So how did the ancients make long thin strands prior to plying? It now seems that for most of pharaonic Egypt linen thread was not spun in singles, but fibres joined to make a long thread by splicing.

You can see a demonstration of splicing done by Sally Pointer on nettle here (21 minutes in) , though flax would be spliced in the same way. 

From the same tomb scene, to the left of the plying woman, there appears to be a kneeling woman, whom I assume is splicing.

You can read more about the scenes here.

The Petrie Museum has some linen cloth from Lahun, some of which is spliced.

Now I have wondered if splicing enabled the Egyptians to get finer thread than by spinning singles. 

There is another aspect to this, with splicing the fibre doesn't have to be processed quite so much as it does with spinning singles. The bits of plant which are not fibre can be beaten out after weaving. Was this a job carried out by men? Perhaps the male 'washermen' whom we know from text, by the river were also fulling linen.

Just thoughts. Comments welcome.

The first picture is from a facsimile by Norman de Garis Davis in 1931. The second is a copy of the same, but enhanced to make it clearer (from Rooijakkers 2005).

Rooijakkers, T. 2005., "Unravelling Beni Hassan: Textile Production in the Beni Hasan Tomb Paintings" 

Archaeological Textiles Newsletter 41 (Autumn 2005), 2-32.

Tents, Tombs and Textiles

Bronze Age Egypt was an international hub, exchanging goods and ideas with the Mediterranean and beyond. 

I have recently been reading an article by Elizabeth Barber. You can download it here: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188080805.pdf

She suggests, quite convincingly that fabric from the Aegean was used to decorate tent interiors in Egypt in the New Kingdom (around 1500-1300BC). While we don’t actually have many ancient Egyptian tent fragments what we have are tomb ceilings, which show what you would see when you looked up (the other designs of stars seem to suggest that). We also have pictures of Minoan textiles fragments.

International links are close to our hearts at Swansea Uni.

Those interlocking spiral designs do look a bit Cretan. Is this a coincidence? What do you think?

Here is a close up of a Cretan textile.

You can find out more about it here:

https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/aegean-dyes/

More can be found online.

Here are some New Kingdom tomb ceilings:

TT51

And some more you can look at online:

Menna (TT69):

    https://www.arce.org/project/tomb-menna-theban-necropolis

    https://www.crooktree.com/p/33658bbf/915363019/egypt-egyptian-ancient-luxor-tombs

Kenamun (TT162)

    https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/548305

Google will bring up more

I am hoping to do an Egypt Centre discovering textiles series of talks and demonstrations. If you are interested and want to keep in touch with what else we do sign up here.

Reference

Barber, E. 1990. 'Reconstructing The Ancient Aegean/Egyptian Textile Trade', Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. 593.