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