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.