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

Happy New Year from the Egypt Centre

The Egypt Centre has several small faience vessels made of faience. Unfortunately, we don't have any complete examples of this type, but I can show you a neck part and body so you can see how a whole one would look.

This type of vessel was popular during the 26th Dynasty, during the reigns of Apries and Amasis (c.550BC).

So many things about this type of vessel suggest that it is to do with rebirth and revival, and there is specific evidence that it was associated with the revivification of the New Year. But guess what, as with many ancient items we can still only take a guess as to what it was specifically used for.

Hints of rebirth/revival

Some of these vessels are found in graves. While not everything found in graves if ancient Egypt is to do with rebirth and revival after death, a lot was. For example: grapes and wine suggesting revival are associated with tombs; scarab beetles associated with the daily renewal of the sun; images of the daily renewal of the sun; etc. are all associated with tombs.

Secondly, the overall shape of the body bit is a squashed circle, reminiscent of the sun coming up above the horizon. Notice that the ancients did not depict the sun here as a proper circle, but rather a squashed circle.

There are baboons each side of the neck of the vessel. The baboons could represent Thoth and the New Year myth of The Return of the Distant One. Briefly the myth tells of Sekhmet being sent out to kill mankind, of her being persuaded to come back to Egypt in peace by Thoth who could take the form of a baboon, and the ensuing drunken celebrations. At philae, dwarves and baboons are shown paired in celebrations for The Return of the Distant One. Baboons are also said the call and 'dance' in the morning as though welcoming the newly risen sun.

There are depictions of lotus flowers (water lilies) on the vessel. The sweet smell of the lotus was said to revive. The water lily also sinks down beneath the water and then rises up to greet the sun in the morning. It was said that in the beginning a water lily rose from the waters of chaos. When it opened up it gave birth to sun god Re who rose into the sky.

And a Happy New Year?

The big clue is that the sides of the vessel spell out in hieroglyphs wpt nfr rnpt (a good/beautiful/ new year.

Moreover, there are three lines symbolising water after the New Year message. For the ancient Egyptians the  Nile was linked to the turning of the year.

New Year was heavily associated with the annual flooding of the Nile. And the annual flooding of the Nile was also bound up with the first sighting of the star, Sodep after its disappearance for around 70 days. The Egyptians believed the Nile to be the efflux (humours of the body) of Osiris, and the earth was fertilised by the flood, as Isis was her husband Osiris. The Nile's annual life-bringing flood was therefore seen as the union of Isis and Osiris, when they conceived their sun, Horus.

According to a text from Edfu (Edfu IV.3, 1-8), the New Year celebrations seemed quite fun:

There are all kinds of bread in loaves as numerous as grains of sand. Oxen abound like locusts. The smell of roast fowl, gazelle, or, oryx and ibex reach the sky. Wine flows freely through the town like the Nile bursting forth from the Two Caverns. Myrrh scattered on the brazier with incense can be smelled a mile away. The city is bestrewed with faience, glittering with natron and garlanded with flowers and fresh herbs. Its youths are drunk, its citizens glad, and its young maidens are beautiful to behold, rejoicing is all around it and festivity is in all its quarters. There is no sleep to be had there until dawn.

So what did the ancient Egyptians do with them?

We don't really know, but the fact that these are small vessels might suggest that they were used for holding samples of the new Nile water. In their size and shape these faience vessels are similar to later pilgrim vessels which later contained water from holy sites. Of course, a similarity in shape doesn't necessarily mean a similarity in use.

The New Year for the ancient Egyptians wasn't of course 1st January. Rather the Nile flooded annually around the 19th of July. Celebrations, continued over a series of days. So I may be late in wishing you a Happy New Year, but let celebration continue as it did for the ancients!

Further Reading 

Blanquet, C-H, 1992, ‘Typologie de la bouteille de nouvel an’ in Cl. Obsomer, A-L. Oosthoek (ed) Amosiades Melanges offerts au professeur Claude Vanderslyen par ses anciens etudiant, Louvain-la-Neuve, 49-54. 

Yamani, S. 2002, New Year’s bottles from Tell Marqula (Dakhla Oasis). Bulletin De L’Instit Français D’Archeologie Orientale, 102, 425-436.