Page:The Industrial Arts of India.djvu/199

 "was very ornamental, and embroidered with all sorts of flowers which the earth produces, and there were interwoven into it all sorts of variety that might be an ornament, excepting the forms of “animals.” The passages in which various classical writers describe curtains, and carpets, and broidered work, figured with animals and men, “ Persians,” “ portraits of Kings,” and “ Par- thian letters, 35 are too numerous for quotation. It is an interesting fact that at Rai Bareli and other places in Gudh a peculiar brocade is made inwoven in gold and colored silks with passages from the Vedas, the Koran, and Watts 3 Hymns.

Beside chand-tara, among other poetical names for Indian patterns of silks and kincobs, may be mentioned mazchar, u ripples of silver ” ; dup-chan, “ sunshine and shade ” ; hatimtarakski, “ pigeon's eyes 7? ; bulbulchasm, “ nightingale’s eyes ” ■ and murgala, “peacock's necks.”

The manufacture of colored silks was, of course, originally introduced into India from China, but at what period it is almost impossible to say. They are mentioned, as we have seen, in the Ra may an a, but whether of Chinese manufacture or Indian cannot now be determined. In the Mahabharata it is said that the Chinas, Hunas, Kaskas, and Cauchas, who lived in the mountains, “ brought as tribute to Yudhisthira, silk and silkworms.” If the “ Chinas ” here mentioned were really the Chinese, the question would be settled, but from their association with the Hunas, &c, they were probably some tribe of the North-Western Himalayas ; and so everything is left in obscurity as to the first introduction of Chinese silk into India. It is not even known whether the Arabs, in their first arrival in India, found the silk manufacture already going on there, or introduced it them- selves. In the Bible the first undoubted notice of silk is In the Revelation xviii 12, The Hebrew terms which are supposed to refer to silk are me ski and demeshek. The former, in Ezek, xvi to, 13, is translated by “silk,” and the latter, in Amos iii 12, by Damascus : — “ Thus salth the Lord, As the shepherd taketh out of