TEXTILES AND EMBROIDERIES. Inasmuch as "tex tile" is a general term for all woven fabrics, and "embroidery" is the ornamentation thereof, it is well, in treating the history and development of the two subjects, to consider the two together. The following sections are made: (I) Europe and the Near East; (2) America; (3) India; (4) The Far East.
Weaving was one of the earliest crafts, if not actually the earli est, practised by primitive mankind. Whether its invention goes back to a time when men were still nomads we cannot say; but at the stage of human development when lake-dwellings were erected threads were already woNatn into fabrics. Implements for preparing the threads, and fragments of the fabrics themselves, have been found on such sites. There is nothing to show that these stuffs were enriched with a pattern. The first attempts in that direction were probably made by the application of pigments or some sort of simple embroidery.
The East is the natural home of patterned fabrics. The Chinese were the first cultivators of the silkworm for the textile threads it provides. Recent excavations have shown that the valley of the Indus is the native home of the variety of the cotton plant still cultivated for weaving purposes. To the valley of the Nile has long been attributed the origin of linen weaving. To one of these regions we should naturally look for the first patterned stuffs.
The earliest known to exist are some linen stuffs from Egypt of the 15th century B.C. (see TAPESTRY). In them pattern-weaving has already reached a highly developed stage, and far earlier examples may only await the spade of the excavator. For the thousand years which follow we again have nothing in the way of patterned stuffs. The next in chronological sequence come from the graves of Greek colonists in the Crimea, and are now in the Hermitage museum at Leningrad. They are mostly of wool, with woven, painted or embroidered ornamenta tion. The patterns include figures on horse-back, warriors, god desses, chariots, animals, birds, vines, flowers, anthemion ornament, scrolls, diapers and stripes. A few fragments are of linen; there is one silk stuff of uncertain age, and some of the embroidery is in gold thread. For the most part the graves are of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.c., but some are earlier and others later. Stuffs of late Graeco-Roman times from the burying grounds of Egypt share the common features of Graeco-Roman art then spread around the shores of the Mediterranean. Linen
is the principal material, but coloured woollen threads, particularly in purple, are generally used for the ornamentation, and as time passes the whole fabric is sometimes of wool.
For early Christian textiles we are still dependent upon Egypt. The Cross, plain or jewelled, and sometimes of the looped form borrowed from an Egyptian hieroglyph, first appears in the 3rd or 4th century, to be followed by Alpha and Omega, the dove and other emblems. A little later, subjects from the Gospels and the Old Testament are found. By this time two significant changes have come about. Embroidery tends to replace woven ornament, and silk becomes a common material.
Persia, the land whence came the first silk threads used in the West, now claims attention. From the begin ning Persia held the monopoly of the import trade in raw silk from China, and this it long kept, in spite of efforts made to evade it by exploring a northern route round the upper shores of the Caspian and a southern one by sea. The earliest known Persian textiles belong to the time of the Sassanian kings, who ruled from A.D. 211 until the Mohammedan conquest towards the middle of the 7th century. No silk fabrics of that time are now known to exist in Persia, but their nature may be learned from contempo rary rock-cut reliefs, representing the royal exploits and amuse ments. Textile-patterns shown in these are so characteristic, and so faithfully rendered, that with their aid a number of silk stuffs from various sources may be identified. Chief among them is a green silk with a dragon of peculiar design evidently derived from the art of ancient Babylonia and Assyria. It is identical with that on the robe of the Sassanian king Chosroes II. in rock cut reliefs at Tak-i-Bostan near Kirmanshah. The same relief identifies as Sassanian a silk stuff with cocks in roundels, found in the Cappella Sancta Sanctorum in Rome in 1905. Other stuffs of this group are in the cathedral treasury at Sens in France, in the treasuries of Sion and Saint Maurice d'Agaune in Switzerland, and at Aachen in Germany. Fragments have also been found in the buried sites of the Gobi desert region in Central Asia.