Cloth was one of the most valuable things most ancient households made, and it took far more time than the finished garment suggests. Fibre had to be harvested and prepared, spun into thread, woven on a loom, and often dyed and finished, all by hand. Because textiles rot, much of the evidence comes from the durable tools and from a few places where dry or waterlogged conditions preserved the cloth itself.
Fibres
The main fibres varied by region and period.
- Wool from sheep was the main fibre across much of the Near East and Mediterranean. Sheep bred for fine or abundant wool appear over time, and wool takes dye very well.
- Linen, from flax, was the most important cloth in Egypt, where it was used for clothing, sails and the wrappings of mummification rituals.
- Cotton was grown and worked in South Asia, and cotton cloth is known from the Indus region in the third millennium BCE. It reached the Mediterranean world more widely only later.
- Silk was produced in China, and its trade became famous through the Han silk exports that travelled westward across Asia.
- Other fibres, such as hemp, nettle, goat hair and plant bast, served local needs, and in the Andes alpaca and cotton were both important.
Spinning
Spinning twists loose fibres into a continuous thread. The commonest tool was the drop spindle, a stick weighted with a disc called a whorl, which is often made of clay, stone or bone and is among the most frequently recovered objects on excavated settlements. A distaff held the prepared fibre. Spinning was slow, and it is often estimated that several spinners were needed to keep a single weaver supplied, which means spinning accounted for a large share of all textile labour. It was work that could be done while walking, tending animals or talking.
The quality of the thread matters. Even, fine yarn made softer and lighter cloth, and the size of whorls and the thickness of surviving thread help archaeologists work out what kinds of cloth were being made.
Weaving
Weaving interlaces vertical warp threads with horizontal weft threads. Loom types varied.
- The warp-weighted loom, which stood upright with groups of warp threads held taut by hanging weights of clay or stone, was widespread around the Mediterranean and in parts of Europe. The loom weights found in rows in the ruins of houses are the main evidence for it.
- In Egypt and the Near East, horizontal ground looms and later vertical two-beam looms were used.
- In the Americas, the backstrap loom let a weaver fix one end to a post and the other around her own body, and it remains in use in some communities today.
Weavers made plain weave, twill and patterned cloth, and could add decorative bands or tapestry-woven designs. Textiles from the Tarim Basin mummies, preserved by the dry desert conditions, include woollen twill cloth in coloured patterns, and the Andes have yielded some of the most elaborate textiles of the ancient world, preserved by the dry coast of Peru.
Dyeing
Natural dyes came from plants, insects and shellfish, and many needed a mordant, a mineral substance such as alum that helps the colour bind to the fibre.
- Red came from madder roots and from insects such as kermes in the Mediterranean world, and cochineal was used in the Americas.
- Blue came from indigo plants, or from woad in Europe. Dyers made the blue by fermenting the leaves, and the dyed cloth turned from yellowish-green to blue as it was exposed to air.
- Yellow came from weld and other plants, and saffron was a luxury yellow.
- Purple was famous. The dye from the murex sea snail was produced in cities on the eastern Mediterranean coast and is associated with the Tyrian purple dye of the Phoenicians. Large quantities of shells were needed for small amounts of dye, so purple cloth was costly and often tied to rank.
Fulling, the cleaning and thickening of woollen cloth by treading and washing, was done in separate workshops in the Roman world. The fullers’ shops excavated at Pompeii offer a concrete picture of the trade and of the part it played in Pompeii daily life.
Labour and the household
In most societies cloth production was largely women’s work, though not exclusively, and it took place at home, in palaces and temples, and in organised workshops. In Greek and Roman writing the image of the woman at the loom stands for household virtue, and the ideals of Roman matrons often included wool-working, even if wealthy families relied on enslaved workers for much of the labour.
Larger institutions organised cloth production on a big scale. Mesopotamian temple and palace records show many women and children working on textiles and receiving rations, with the numbers reaching thousands in some cities. A smaller commercial version of the same trade appears in the Kanesh merchant colonies of Anatolia, where Assyrian traders exported cloth in return for silver.
Cloth as wealth
Cloth served as clothing, bedding, sails, sacks, tents and shrouds, and it was also wealth. It could be paid as tribute, stored by states and offered to gods. In the Inca world, fine cloth was one of the most prestigious goods in the state’s arrangements given as a reward within Inca imperial society and burnt as an offering in ritual.
Textile work links the household to the wider economy in a way few other crafts do. A family’s spinning and weaving covered its own needs and could also produce a surplus to sell, and a state could demand cloth as a form of tax. That is why the humble spindle whorl is one of the most informative small finds on an archaeological site.