Silk is a luxurious material. It is light, smooth, shiny, it can be dyed in bright colours and woven into a wide variety of fabrics eminently suitable for conspicuous display as well as being pleasant to wear. According to legend, the way to obtain silk by unravelling cocoons of silk worms before hatching was discovered in the twenty-seventh century bc by a Chinese empress and kept a secret for several millennia. According to another legend, Chinese monopoly was broken in the sixth century ad when Roman Emperor Justinian caused two monks to smuggle a supply of silk worm eggs to Europe in order to establish silk production in Europe. A third legend says that silk was produced on the Greek island of Cos at least since the fourth century bc. The current volume queries these legends, examining the available body of textual sources and archaeological finds of silk in the light of recent research. Another aspect addressed is the question of what went east in exchange for silk. This is subtly alluded to in the book's cover, which displays a figured wool tapestry of Western origin excavated in the Tarim Basin (Xinjiang, China) by Aurel Stein. Transfers of technology, techniques, and designs and whether they went east or west are further themes.
Based on a workshop held at Harvard University in 2012, the volume is dedicated to the memory of Dr Irene Good (1958–2013), a pioneer in using biochemical analysis in order to identify silks from different moth species. It consists of an introduction, eight papers, and an appreciation of Dr Good.
The Introduction by Hildebrandt states the aim of the volume, to connect research on exchange along the Silk Roads from different areas and disciplines, and it surveys recent research on silk production, identification of silk moth species, archaeological finds, and on the Silk Roads in general. The papers to follow are then introduced and summarised.
In the first chapter, ‘Looking Towards the West: How the Chinese Viewed the Romans’, Liu Xinru examines historical sources from Han China for evidence on what the Chinese knew about the Roman world. Her results indicate that contacts were indirect, through the Parthians and other middlemen. Liu argues that the Han Chinese saw the Roman Empire as a continuation of the Hellenistic world and believed that Greek was the language of Rome; she also examines why Chinese sources describe the Roman Empire as having its own sericulture, and gives a series of examples of Roman wool rugs and tapestries mentioned in Chinese correspondence or found in burials. The paper gives a fascinating glimpse of how the Roman World was perceived from afar, and of the tangled trade relations between East and West. Unfortunately no map is provided for this paper. Readers have to make do with the general map that accompanies the Introduction but does not include all the sites that are mentioned.
Chapter 2, ‘Textiles and Trade in South Asia during the Proto-Historic and Early Historic Period’, by J. Mark Kenoyer, offers an overview of textile production and trade between South Asia and the West between 2600 bc and 300 ad, but also surveys evidence of fibre use in the Indus valley 10,000–2600 bc. Of particular interest for this volume are the claims of wild silk fibres and textiles from Harappa and Chanhudaro (Pakistan) dated 2450–2200 bc. These would be the first evidence of early silk weaving outside of China. With this, Kenoyer argues that silk production began in the Indus area almost at the same time as in China, but based on different moth species. This would shed new light on the early history of silk and open entirely new vistas for the origin of the silks mentioned in Persian, later Greek, and Roman texts, and indeed archaeological finds of silks in the Roman world. Kenoyer's data suggest that a centre of silk production existed in east Bengal during the Mauryan period (321–185 bc).
The third chapter, ‘Word Migration on the Silk Road: The Etymology of English Silk and Its Ongeners’, by Adam Hyllested, investigates questions of exchange along the Silk Road and the way silk reached the West through the etymology of silk. A thoroughly linguistic paper is a bit difficult to follow for an archaeologist, but concludes that the northwestern European word silk derives from Alanic, a Scytho-Sarmatian language, and argues that this points to medieval trade routes along the northern shores of the Black Sea, reaching Western Europe in the seventh century ad.
Chapter 4 is Berit Hildebrandt's paper on ‘Silk Production and Trade in the Roman Empire’. It also deals with etymology, in this case with the terms for silk in Greek and Latin, and how it can inform on the introduction of silk in the Mediterranean area. Hildebrandt investigates the passage in Aristotle's Historia Animalium thought to describe silk production on the Greek island of Cos in the fourth century bc. By comparing it with other textual evidence and the archaeological record, Hildebrandt finds that the date of the passage and the attribution of authorship to Aristotle are doubtful. She concludes that it is impossible to establish a date for when silk was first known in the Mediterranean, and when it was first produced there. This is an important reassessment of established knowledge, and leaves Procopius’ story of smuggling silk worm eggs as the earliest indication of cultivated silk production in the West. Hildebrandt goes on to explore how Western texts reflect on the nature of the silk trade and finds, like Liu Xinru in Chapter 1, that exchange between the West and China went through middlemen and that silk supply was irregular. The texts reveal that silk—raw silk, skeins of silk, as well as woven silk textiles—came in several different qualities, and that prices were high. A pound of purple-dyed silk equalled two pounds of gold! Additionally, inscriptions are scrutinized for information on people who worked on or traded silk. The paper provides a useful overview of textual sources, an important revision, and a wealth of new information on the procurement, handling, and production of silk and silk textiles in the Roman world.
Chapter 5, ‘Perspectives on the Wide World of Luxury in Later Antiquity: Silk and Other Exotic Textiles Found in Syria and Egypt’, by Thelma K. Thomas, surveys exotic textiles in silk as well as other materials from the towns of Dura Europos and Palmyra in Syria, and Karanis, Antinoë, and Panopolis in Egypt. In this paper, silk has a supporting rather than a leading role. Instead, attention is drawn to rare techniques and designs in silk as well as in other materials. Thomas argues that these reflect cross-cultural tastes and cosmologies in addition to commerce. In this she is one of few contributors to this book who addresses theoretical issues. Extensively illustrated, the paper offers splendid samples of colourful textile designs available to wealthy inhabitants of Roman towns in Syria and Egypt.
‘Decoration, Astrology and Empire: Inscribed Silk from Niya in the Taklamakan Desert’ (Ch. 6), by Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, deals with the symbolism of a silk used to make an armguard for a warrior buried at Niya (Xinjiang, China) in the third century ad. Tseng finds that the woven inscription commemorates the Han conquest of the Qiang in 61 ad. The interred man was a Caucasian. Tseng argues that he was a ruler of the Jingjue Kingdom, and that the inscribed silk was chosen for the armguard in order to demonstrate that he was a faithful ally of the Han emperor.
Chapter 7 is Zhao Feng's paper ‘Domestic, Wild, or Unraveled? A Study on Tabby, Taqueté, and Jin with Spun Silk from Yingpan, Xinjiang, Third-Fourth Centuries’. Silk fabrics from burials around Yingpan at the foot of the Kuruk Tag Mountains are described. Three types proved to be woven of spun silk. As all have been identified as Bombyx mori silk—the kind that can be processed into long filaments that do not need spinning—Zhao discusses why these were spun. He argues that silk fabrics from China were unravelled in order to make local fabric types: tabby and warp- and weft-faced compound tabbies (jin and taqueté respectively). Although mainly empirical, the paper discusses how the silk fabrics were unravelled, who carried it out, and where and when it took place.
Chapter 8 by Angela Sheng is titled ‘Chinese Silks That Circulated among Peoples North and West: Implications for Technical Change in Early Times?’ Sheng explores evidence for weave and loom types in China and the contemporay Roman World in order to discuss to what degree textile technologies were exchanged between the two empires. Two types of compound tabbies are discussed: Jin or warp-faced compound tabby and taqueté or weft-faced compound tabby. The former is known in China from about 300 bc, the latter occurs in the West earlier than in China. Two loom types mentioned in texts of Han dynasty date are considered as possible tools for the weaving of jin textiles while the taquetés of the West are considered to have been made on a loom similar to the Persian zilu loom. Sheng argues that a group of taquetés and an earlier double-cloth found in the Taklamakan area in northwest China show Greco-Roman and Persian influence and must have been woven west of China, probably in central or west Asia. Sheng's reasoning is highly technical and rather difficult to follow even for a textile specialist. Unfortunately, it is also marred by outdated knowledge. Sheng appears unaware of a series of wool taquetés from sites in Egypt dated to the first and second centuries ad that in my opinion alter her premises (Cardon, Reference Cardon and Cuvigny2003; Ciszuk, Reference Ciszuk, Cardon and Feugère2000; Reference Ciszuk, Alfaro, Wild and Costa2004). Swedish handweaver Martin Ciszuk also carried out reconstructions on how taquetés and other complex weaves from the Roman world were made.
Silk is an attractive volume with a small but wide-ranging selection of papers. It contributes importantly to our knowledge on the origins and history of silk production and on technological and commercial relationships between the East and the West. The dissecting of etymology and textual sources leading to the revision of stories like the one on early silk production on the Greek island of Cos is important. The suggestion that silk production began in India almost at the same time as in China, and the identification of different species of silk moth, are further important issues, but need to be scrutinized. Fibre identification using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and amino acid analysis are methods that are still new, standards of documentation are in the process of being established (Rast-Eicher, Reference Rast-Eicher2016), and in some cases results have been contradictorily interpreted (Bender Jørgensen, Reference Bender Jørgensen2013). More work on this is needed. The geographical scope of the book is immense and far from all areas are covered. We are still in the beginning of understanding the history and impact of silk production, the exchange of silk and wool textiles between the East and the West, and the transfer of design ideas, techniques, and technology.
