Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/100



The art of working with the needle flowers, fruits, human and animal forms, or any fanciful design, upon webs woven of silk, linen, cotton, wool, hemp, besides other kinds of stuff, is so old that it reaches far into the prehistoric ages.

Those patterns, after so many fashions, which we see figured upon the garments worn by men and women in Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, but especially on the burned-clay vases made and painted by the Greeks during their most archaic as well as later times, or we read about in the writings of that people, were not wrought in the loom, but done by the needle.

The old Egyptian loom—and that of the Jews must have been like it—was, as we know from paintings, of the simplest shape, and seems to have never been able to do anything more diversified in the designs of its patterns than straight lines in different colours, and at best nothing higher in execution than checker-work: beyond this, all else was put in by hand with the needle. In Paris, at the Louvre, are several pieces of early Egyptian webs coloured, drawings of which have been published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson in his short work "The Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs." There are two pieces of the same textile scarlet, with one brede woven of narrow red stripes on a broad yellow stripe, the other border being a broad yellow stripe edged by a narrow scarlet one, both wrought up and down with needlework; the second piece of blue is figured all over in white embroidery with a pattern of netting, the meshes of which shut in irregular cubic shapes, and in the lines of the reticulation the mystic "gammadion" or "fylfot" is seen. Of them Sir J. G. Wilkinson says:—"They are mostly cotton, and, though their date is uncertain, they suffice to show that the manufacture was Egyptian; and the many dresses painted on the monuments of the eighteenth dynasty show that the most varied patterns were used by the Egyptians more than 3000 years ago, as they were at a later period by the Babylonians, who became noted for their needlework." Other specimens of Egyptian embroidery were on those corslets sent to Grecian temples by Amasis, about which we have before spoken (p. xiv.)

That the Israelites embroidered their garments, especially those worn