Saturday, 6-September-2003 11:11 AM GMT
The card on this exhibit reads
Linen shirt from the tomb of Tutankhamun
c. 1370-1352 BC
This shirt was found wrapped as a 'scarf' around the neck of an Anubis statue. It may have been made in the year of Tutankhamun's birth since it originally bore an inscription dating it to he 9th year of Akhenaten's reign (reigned c. 1379-1362 BC).
Tutankhamun reigned for approximately 9 years between 1361 and 1352 BC. He died at about the age of 18 years.
Plain or tabby weave linen.
Warp: s spun, approximately 62-66 threads per cm.
Weft: s spun, approximately 35-36 threads per cm.
On loan from the government of Egypt.
I like old things. I like going to museums and seeing ancient bits of civilizations long gone, and the older the better. I have been interested in the cradle of civilization for as long as I can remember, both in the cultures and the religions. Art, philosophy, science, crafts... my library includes any number of books on these civilizations and I'm a sucker for the bargain shelves at the local bookstores. A coffee table book under $5.00 on some aspect of the ancient world, and I am hard put to resist.
There was a time I was even studying the ancient hieroglyphs from the Book of the Dead. In college, I got the Smithsonian magazine and the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogs, and I would order things out of them. My prize possession in those years was a several hundred dollar bronze replica of an Egyptian cat that I got to honor Bast in my home. All I can say is that it is good that I have no shelf space today, and that I do not get those print catalogs.
Anyway, here was a 3300 year old piece of cloth made into a garment, and in remarkable shape for what it was. The quality of the weave and the fabric was impressive too. I say this as someone whose many hobbies and crafts did at one time include spinning and weaving. I still have a basket full of wool, carding tools, drop spindle and knitty-knotty. All of these might be self explanatory save for the knitty knotty. Mine, at least, is just this wooden device with a cross shaft and two 'Tee' ends, one which is at an angle to the other. In other words, it won't lay flat unless you 'disassemble' it by sliding the lock pin out of the top and sliding the other 'Tee' bar down to the bottom. It was used as an intermediary for balling yarn.
I never spun thread, just yard. That was challenging enough on a drop spindle for me, but I got good enough at it to make enough yarn to crochet a tam. I still have a wide assortment of wool dyes, but they all required such safeguards and precautions that I never used them. I need a workshop where I can go through the hoops for breathing safety on some of them. I always enjoyed spinning as an idle pastime, the smell of the lanolin and the feel of it on the hands. Washing the wool though was a bit annoying. And boy was it filthy when just store bought that way!
This is another thing where it was good I did not have a lot of money or only had limited space. At the time if I had five hundred dollars, I'd have a spinning wheel now. And if I'd had a -bunch- of money? A loom. I still have a small table-top loom that I got from my mom, but it does not warp well.
So I look at things like this ancient Egyptian shirt and think 'Hey, I can't even do that well... I must not know enough.' I could definitely construct the shirt from fabric, but not the fabric itself. Maybe a nice woolen blend I could do. Maybe that's why I was always in the Scots camp at faire.
This makes my mind ramble a bit, thinking about soap making and the Pleiocene. When I come across some craft or skill that interests me, it usually results in the spending of too much money and an intense flurry of activity around said craft. The soap making efforts started that way, with a 'soap kit' bought at Costco for about twelve dollars. It was one of those microwave-the-gel-soap and pour into molds, but you could add flowers, or oil if you wanted. The thing that really got me going was the book that was about real soap making and went into the process of saponification. I never used the microwave-me-to-make-soap stuff. I did go and buy all the supplies I'd need to make my own home made olive oil soap.
As with a lot of these sorts of crafts, I was very good at it, and although time-consuming it was easy. I'm always making do without a real workshop (the candle making effort will help explain that one, but that really is a digression). So I've made a number of batches of soap, all quite successful. None of the batches failed to cure, none of them had pockets of unsaponified fat and lye. It's just time consuming, and something I usually put off until the winter months during a power outage. Soap making is a fine thing to do when all you have at your disposal is a gas stove.
The part about the Pliocene has to do with the Saga of the Pliocene exiles, a wonderful set of books by Julian May that is part of the same 'universe' as the vinculum 'Intervention' and the Milieu Trilogy. People from a future society would go back in time through a one-way portal either to escape the present, for adventure, or because they just didn't fit in with society as a whole. There were limitations on what you could take back with you, and really if you were only largely taking what you could carry, some day you might run out of soap.
So anyway, I was getting congenially teased at work one staff meeting about soap making, and I said, "Hey, at least if I end up stuck in the Pliocene, I'll know how to make soap." No one got it of course, but when I came home and told the people who would get it what had happened, they were most amused.
Now, it's up there on the list of 'silly things that I said that I can always get teased for.'
I probably stood and stared at thus shirt for five minutes, taking different pictures at different angles, again having to contend with flash or no flash vs. glass over display case and so on.
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