| Description |
“Tunic fragment with shoulder ornament. The ground is dark yellow. At one edge of the fragment is a segment of a plain, dark red clavus. The ornament, a roundel, has a dark brown spiral-wave border and contains the figures of two dancers, wearing only scarves, each with one upraised hand. They are worked in brown and dull orange. Woven entirely of wool, the ground thread count is 8 x 26 [warp : weft per square cm], the tapestry insert 7 x 46-50 [warp : weft per square cm]. Like the preceding example [CAS 0389-2422], the roundel was woven as a circle in a nearly invisible lentoid. The tips of the lentoid are tapestry, woven with the same yarn as the main ground of the tunic. On the reverse, the remains of weft floats indicate that the weft shots of the ground passed behind the tapestry portion of the textile and were completed before the ground was filled in around it. All yarn is S-twist. Tenth century. Remarks: For the possible symbolism of the dancers see the remarks for Number 33 [CAS 0389-2451]. [Regarding textiles in this group, DL Carroll # 41-72 (CAS 0389-2382, -2384, -2389, -2390, -2391, -2392, -2393, -2396, -2399, -2401, -2405, -2409, -2410, -2411, -2414, -2415, -2416, -2417, -2419, -2420, -2422, -2423, -2424, -2427, -2434, -2435, -2436, -2453, -2454, -2457, -2579, -2580, -2581, -2582, -2599):] After the Arab conquest in the mid-seventh century, Coptic textile design changed its character, moving ever more distant from its classical Roman and Greek sources. In part, this was a reaction against Byzantine culture, associated in the Coptic mind with oppression. Contributing to the change may have been Islamic prohibitions against depicting human and animal figures. Such figures when they appear in Coptic textiles of the later periods become increasingly abstract to the point of being virtually unrecognizable.†[From Looms and Textiles of the Copts by Diane Lee Carroll (San Francisco, CA: Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, No. 11, 1988); Catalog # 57, pp. 136, 164.] |
