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/91

 out. Among those spoken of Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Damascus, Byzantium, Cyprus, Trip or Tripoli, and Bagdad, are easily recognized, as well as the later centres of trade and manufacture, Venice, Genoa and Lucca. To fix the localities of a few others would be but guess-work.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century is mentioned occasionally a silk called "Acca," and, from the description of it, it must have been a cloth of gold shot with coloured silk, figured with animals: William de Clinton, Earl of Huntingdon, gave to St. Alban's monastery a whole vestment of cloth of gold shot with sky-blue, and called cloth of Acca; "unum vestimentum de panno quem Accam dicimus; cujus campus est aerius. In reliquis vero partibus resultat auri fulgor. To some it would look as if this stuff took its name from having been brought to us through the port of Acre. We lean towards this belief on finding, on the authority of Macri, in his valuable Hierolexicon, Venice, 1735, pp. 5, 542, that so used to be written the name of the ancient Ptolemais in Syria.

What in one age, and at a particular place, happened to be so well made, and hence became so eagerly sought for, at a later period, and in another place, got to be much better wrought and at a lower price. Time, indeed, changed the name of the market, but did not alter in any great degree either the quality of the material, or the style of the design wrought upon it. All over the kingdom of the Byzantine Greeks the loom had to change its gearing very little. The Saracenic loom, whether in Asia, Africa, or Spain, was alway Arabic, though Persia could not forget her olden Zoroasterian traditions about the "hom" or tree of life separating lions, and having all about lion-hunting cheetahs, and birds of various sorts.

With regard to the whole of Asia, we learn that its many peoples, from the earliest times, knew how not only to weave cloth of gold, but figure it too with birds and beasts. Almost two thousand years afterwards, Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, found exactly the very same kinds of textile known in the days of Darius still everywhere, from the shores of the Mediterranean to far Cathay, in demand and woven. What he says of Bagdad, he repeats in fewer words about many other cities.

In finding their way to England these fabrics had given them not so often the names of the places where they had been wrought, but, if not in all, at least in most instances, the names of the seaports in the Mediterranean where they had been shipped.