Aegeum_18_First_Day

AEGEAN ORNAMENTS AND DESIGNS IN EGYPT

Few substantive additions need be made to the extensive collection of decorative patterns of Aegean origin found in Egypt that Helene Kantor published fifty years ago.1 What we can see today with greater clarity, however, is the context behind those patterns: medium, history of development, inner typology, and mode of travel. Kantor already suspected that many of the designs belonged to the realm of textiles, and she has turned out to be right. Recent studies in the development of ornate textiles and pattern weaving2 have shown that while the Egyptians prior to 1500 BC specialized in weaving plain white linen of remarkable fineness (sometimes as fine as 200 threads to the inch), the Europeans specialized in highly ornate pattern weaving, at first in linen and then in wool. Unlike linen, wool comes in a natural variety of colors and also is easy to dye permanently. Those features, together with the long, snowy winters (when you can’t do much else), seem to have led the Europeans to evolve — starting in the Neolithic — a tradition of ornate textiles that continues to this day. As yet, we possess no actual pieces of patterned cloth from the Bronze Age Aegean. The earliest we have comes from Lef kandi from about 1000 BC. On the other hand, surviving pieces from Central Europe show us fairly well the development of the tradition to which the Minoans fell heir. The story begins about 5500 BC with the development of the warp-weighted loom in the middle reaches of the Danube and the Tisza River, a richly productive area for the first farmers of Europe. This loom became the principal loom of Europe down to Roman times, and is still in use. By the third millennium BC, weavers in Switzerland, Germany, and northern Italy were busy making polychrome patterned fabrics. We learn from scattered sites where textiles have survived that the indigenous techniques centered on patterns formed over a plain groundweave with supplemental thread, usually wefts, producing brocade, overshot, and warp pickup. Most of the Aegean patterns Kantor observed in Egypt are easiest to reproduce in precisely these patterning techniques. In this they differ markedly from the types of designs generated by the textile technology in Mesopotamia and the Levant — techniques that entered Egypt from that quarter soon after 1500 BC. Such a correlation strengthens the argument that the Aegean designs in question came from European-style textiles. It also suggests that we need to take more seriously Minoan roots in earlier Balkan culture. Within the Aegean world we can see certain of Kantor’s motifs developing slowly, step by step. In Egypt, on the contrary, these patterns appear abruptly, without build-up (although two or three proved attractive enough to the Egyptian taste that they have a later history of evolution, or more accurately dissolution into Egyptian-style components: compare, for example, designs N and O in Kantor’s Plate III). This argument is best seen by dividing the designs into families, which can then be tracked one by one. Let’s begin with the family of three- and four-pronged interlocks. The most famous renditions of it within the Aegean are all on textiles: the skirt of the dancing woman from Hagia Triada (quatrefoil), the kilts of cupbearers from Knossos (also quatrefoil), and the rather

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KANTOR. Principally: E. BARBER, Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean (1991). See it for references to and discussion of the following details of cloth and textile tools.

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earlier kilt of the acrobat on the Mallia pommel (three-pronged). Kantor also illustrates in her Plate X(C) an early three-pronged version on a seal dating to EM III, grouping it with two other EM III maze-like seal-patterns that are visually not unsimilar. Several other Aegean frescoes show clothing with quatrefoil rapport patterns. Like the four-petaled design on the young “priestess” from the West House on Thera, the design contains a trompe-l’oeil. The West House garment looks as much like overlapping circles as it does like overlapping f lowers, while the pattern we are following also doubles as a rapport pattern composed of run-on swastikas. Apparently this family of designs was a great favorite with Minoan weavers, to the point that a stonecarver tried copying a handsome trefoil version onto an alabaster vase found in LM II layers at the Unexplored Mansion in Knossos.3 (The carver has even graduated the trefoils in size as the vase expands.) By contrast, the pronged interlock turns up just once in Egypt, full blown in its sophistication. That in itself should make us suspect it was copied from an imported Aegean textile. But where it occurs tells a tale also: it occurs on a soffit, that is, the ceiling of a doorway, in the tomb of one Amenemhet, an official under Thutmose III.4 Thutmose III, like Hatshepsut before him, had entertained embassies of visitors from the Aegean, and these Keftiu are shown bringing not only typical Aegean-style metal vessels decorated with bulls but also bolts of textiles over their arms. Now, Amenemhet functioned as Overseer of the Weavers of Amon — precisely the place where Pharaoh’s luxurious textiles were warehoused. Who better than he to be able to see, appreciate, and copy a curiously beautiful foreign cloth? As the geologists say, what did happen can happen. Therefore, having demonstrated that one such textile must have made the trip, we can assume that Kantor’s designs are telling us that other patterned Aegean textiles, too, came to Egypt. Some of the Keftiu ambassadors (e.g., in the tombs of Rekhmire and Menkheperresoneb) wore ornate textiles themselves, in addition to carrying them for presentation. It is curious that the Egyptian artists, who had six colors in their palette and used all six freely, restricted themselves to only red, white, and blue to depict these fancy kilts, with the exception of two yellow kilts clearly fashioned from spotted leopard skins and one other faintly yellow panel. In other words, they perceived their Aegean visitors as dressed almost exclusively in red, white, and blue — a color scheme which tallies with that of the Hagia Triada dancer, at least. So we can deduce that much Aegean fabric came in this tricolor scheme. One ambassador in particular — the third in line in Menkheperresoneb’s tomb — wears a pattern from a family we can trace for well over a millennium: the double heart-spiral, common today on wrought-iron fences. We first encounter it in Middle Kingdom tombs at Qau, Meir, and Assiut. The early date of these sightings, together with Kantor’s EM III rapport patterns and the long Balkan weaving heritage, implies that Peter Warren’s EM II-III village of Myrtos, with all its textile installations, is none too early for the start of fancy pattern-weaving in Crete. The double heart-spiral reappears in the 18th Dynasty: on the kilt of one of the Aegean ambassadors portrayed in the tomb of Menkheperresoneb, on the ceiling of a small private chapel (time of Thutmose IV), as well as on the ceiling of the tomb of Antef, herald to Queen Hatshepsut. Across the centuries, the spirals are always blue on a white ground, the diamonds always red, and the palmettes and dots red, sometimes with a bit of yellow. (Note the dominantly red-white-blue color scheme again.) The versions are just different enough that they do not seem to be copied by one Egyptian from another. Rather, they seem to be copied from successive imports of textiles with this motif from an area where it was traditional. Note that Antef also has a blue and green design closely similar to Kantor’s EM III maze seals — and if you blink you can see green swastikas lurking in the maze. His third design consists of bicolored heart-spirals that have had their curves squared, presumably also an Aegean design, perhaps squared off by use in a less fine-textured woven medium such as matting.

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M. POPHAM, The Minoan Unexplored Mansion at Knossos. BSA suppl. 17 (1984) 234 and pls. 215.5, 216.7, 229.7. For a wider discussion of these designs, see BARBER (supra n. 2) 328-30 and Color Plates 2-3. See BARBER (supra n. 2) for most of the relevant Egyptian tombs with Aegean textile motifs, summarized in Table 15.1, p. 339, and discussed 330-51.

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So where is the double heart-spiral in the Aegean, if it was so popular there? Neither is it shown among the apparel, nor did it get copied into other media during Minoan times. But down in the early Iron Age, it suddenly surfaces on the strikingly red-white-and-blue Geometric vases found in Crete, at such places as Fortetsa and Karphi. Apparently the local Geometric pottery took its inspiration directly from heirloom textiles, just as I have demonstrated elsewhere to be the case on the Greek mainland.5 Another place the heart-spiral turns up — and here we can add to Kantor — is on the cabin of a boat portrayed in Tomb 80 at Thebes, belonging to one Thutnofer, Overseer of the Treasury and Royal Scribe under Amenhotep II. Quite a few of these boats with fancy designs on the sides of central cabins turn up in 18th Dynasty tombs. Kantor illustrates one of them in her Plate III, from the tomb of Kenamun. It has a quadruple spiral rapport pattern with small round elements in the odd-shaped interstices. Versions of this important family of Aegean textile designs occur on several Egyptian depictions of boat cabins, both murals and wooden models, as well as on a fair number of 18th Dynasty ceilings. First the boats. Aegean weavers specialized in wool, which, uniquely among fibers, can be felted to produce a windproof and largely waterproof fabric. Felt is produced by repeatedly mashing wool — either woven or as loose fibers — in a moist and preferably warm environment until the scales on the surfaces of the fibers interlock inextricably. Lightweight and supple, felt is ideal for outdoor protection both at sea and on the windy Eurasian steppes where it originated around 3000 BC. A fresco from Thera shows boats with passenger cabins in which the protective sides have temporarily been rolled down to afford a view, while a fresco from Mycenae shows what Maria Shaw convincingly identifies as four boat cabins with ornamented cloth sides:6 one with figured friezes suggesting a type of woven cloth developed earlier in Syria and then imitated in the Aegean using local techniques, the other three with strange wiggly patterns that turn up easily in felt as well as on hides. New Kingdom Egyptians refer to something they call “Keftiu boats,” without, of course, explaining what they mean. It has occurred to me that perhaps these are Keftiu boats: boats that use colorful fabrics on a frame cabin to shield passengers from the elements during the voyage. Egyptian linen would be entirely unsuitable for such a use. Now the tomb ceilings. A survey of Egyptian tombs shows that, through the 18th Dynasty, the iconographically important scenes occur on the walls, while the ceiling gets decorated from a repertoire of things normally seen overhead: principally stars, f lights of birds, and grape arbors. The wooden cross-struts of the arbor are shown in yellow, with the bunches of grapes and leaves hanging down in between. The other major class of ceiling ornamentation consists of a much wider lattice of yellow (that is, wooden) struts with all-over patterns between: either typical Egyptian mat patterns or the Aegean patterns we have been discussing. Egyptian houses had f lat rooves of dried mud, and in order to keep the mud from crumbling down onto the occupants, the builders laid colorfully woven mats on top of the roofbeams before applying the mud above.7 So mats regularly appeared overhead, too. If Kantor’s Aegean ceiling patterns represent cloth, they too should be found overhead. And indeed we find holes for beams to bear temporary canopies on the face of the temples at Luxor — barrel-vaulted just like some of the tombs in question. Of course, f lat canopies are even easier. So we may deduce that the Egyptians liked to import colorful Aegean fabric for such ostentatious purposes. Note that the design on one of the barrel-vaulted ceilings is remarkably like that on the f lat ceiling of the side chamber of the tholos tomb at Orchomenos, and part of that pattern resembles a ceiling reconstructed by Evans at Knossos. So perhaps the Mycenaeans and Minoans used some of their own cloths for canopies too. In the next era, Euripides has his character Ion set up such a figured cloth canopy from the temple storehouses of Delphi for a ritual dinner — apparently a normal practice, and perhaps a millennium-old one.

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BARBER (supra n. 2) chapter 16. M. SHAW, “Painted ‘Ikria’ at Mycenae?,” AJA 74 (1980) 167-79. W. STEVENSON SMITH, Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt (1958) 171 and fig. 60.

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It is frustrating that we have no patterned textiles surviving from the Bronze Age Aegean. But we almost do. Menkheperresoneb, the High Priest of Amon (and its storehouses) under Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, who portrayed the last two groups of Keftiu ambassadors, put onto his tomb ceiling a curious red-white-and-blue panel. The main design looks like a mat pattern, but skinnier than the usual Egyptian ones. The color scheme should alert us that it is Aegean. Its border, moreover, has a design that shifts abruptly from concentric lozenges to tented zigzags — a shift in midstream found nowhere else in Egypt. But the entire pattern is identical in conception to the Lef kandi belt-band, which was originally of white linen patterned with red wool in warp pick-up technique. There the sudden shifts from lozenges to chevrons to zigzags are occasioned by simple boredom on the part of a bandweaver making yards of the stuff. The change of two or three threads produces exactly those different patterns in that medium and makes the weaving fun again. In short, the shift of pattern can be understood only as a function of weaving. The same is true of the kilts on Menkheperresoneb’s Keftiu, which sport multiple bands of designs similar to that on the Lef kandi band. (This same family of patterns also occurs all over LM IIIA pottery, which suggests yet another example of potters copying from weavers and helps us cross-date the Keftiu frescoes.) But there’s something wrong with those kilts, to a weaver: the fringe is on the wrong edge. The simplest way to weave a cloth with patterned stripes is with the stripes running in the weft direction, but then the fringe formed from cutting the cloth off the loom would run parallel to the stripes. The answer to this puzzle turned up in Chinese Turkestan. There, in the hot, dry, salty sands of the Tarim Basin, Bronze Age textiles have been turning up by the hundreds, almost perfectly preserved in color and form.8 The people are Caucasoid, with big noses, round eyes, full beards, and tall stature — men and women over six feet tall. They wore clothing of sheep’s wool and ate wheat — both sheep and wheat were Near Eastern domesticates. Some of the largest pieces of cloth had been sewn together from numerous narrow strips of plaited wool, some plain and some patterned, giving an effect much like that of the Keftiu striped kilts. But made this way, the cloth will have its fringes at the ends of the bands — right where the Egyptian artists show them. It seems an awfully inefficient way of making cloth, until you consider that these people spent much of their time on the move herding their sheep. They could carry yarn and plaitwork as they trudged, but not a large loom. So this was an efficient use of their time. It is surely no accident that the Indo-Europeans who moved in next door about the same time, the Hittites, also sometimes wore banded kilts with fringes at the ends of the bands — as seen in the King’s Gate relief from Boghazköy. Prehistoric Central Asia was an area functionally connected to the Aegean and Anatolian world only by the tribes moving both east and west through the Eurasian steppes, into the Tarim Basin and into central and southern Europe. It suggests that we need to pay rather more attention to the roots of the Mycenaean Greeks and their kin in steppe culture. In summary, we can now be sure that many of Kantor’s Aegean-style patterns made their way to Egypt piggyback on ornate woolen textiles. The evidence begins so early and the reconstructable designs share so much with the exuberant swirls of Kamares ware that one might wonder if the resemblance of the earliest depictions of Minoan clothing designs (on the clay figurines from Petsofa) to Kamares ware is more than a function of the medium. Were the Kamares pot-painters already getting some ideas for design and coloration from the local weavers? At any rate, Minoan weavers produced elaborate textiles with traditional patterns down to Geometric times, and some of these cloths found their way to Egypt and an appreciative audience. Elizabeth J.W. BARBER

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V. MAIR, “Mummies of the Tarim Basin,” Archaeology 48.2 (1995) 28-35; E. BARBER, The Mummies of Ürümchi (forthcoming).

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Discussion following E.J.W. Barber’s paper: G. Kopcke: What about Syria and the Levant in general as producers of textiles? We tend to argue too much — understandably — on the basis of what is extant. Ebla must have had a significant textile industry, and a sophisticated one. It is somewhat doubtful to me that Crete was, in terms of ideas and materials, the provider to the extent that you suggest. E.J.W. Barber: Looking at the overall use of looms, fibers, dyes and so forth, it would appear right within the known documentable textile history of Egypt that the first attempts at colored pattern weaving occurred during the reign of Thutmose III — we have those attempts; they are clearly beginnings. They are not endings, not middle strange things; they are beginnings. Linen is very difficult to dye. The Egyptians did not have woolly sheep. There are many, many, many details that go into my presentation of the Egyptian fabrics this way, not simply what is represented or what happens to survive in the tombs. Now I absolutely agree with you on Ebla; I think there is a major industry. I think that is, in fact, where tapestry was invented or at least first became commercially profitable, back around 2400 BC. But that is also exactly where we see that technique and that loom traveling outward from, in successive centuries. So it’s not just individual pieces dated. You have to take the entire sweep, and that’s why it took me almost 20 years to put Prehistoric Textiles together. It’s an enormous number of details that have to be juggled. I agree that Syria is another major center of pattern weaving, but I don’t think that Egypt was until the 18th dynasty. C.W. Shelmerdine: I have a question also, which is simply to comment that I was interested in the red, white, and blue scheme because when we get down to the Mycenaean period where we can read about textiles, the three color terms that are usually applied to woven cloth and to the border design and the fringes on them are white, purple-red, and multicolor. We may actually have a few references to blue textiles also. So it’s a perfect later analogy for what you point out. E.J.W. Barber: Thank you. A. Liakos: Did you take into consideration Çatal Hüyük — the fragments of textiles and the murals that imitate textiles in polychrome? E.J.W. Barber: Yes, I have; I’ve looked very carefully at the Çatal Hüyük material. The problem with the Çatal Hüyük material is that Mellaart sort of jumped the gun when he published that things are made out of wool. They are not made out of wool; they are made out of linen. Sheep weren’t woolley for another 2,000 years. And the patterns on the walls may be mat patterns, but it is extremely unlikely on a number of accounts that those are made in textiles, first because linen is nearly impossible to dye, not impossible, but very difficult. It requires very advanced dye technology, which we see developing at the end of the Neolithic, but would be sort of out of the blue at the beginning. Second of all, you can’t make those kind of patterns on a warp-weighted loom. You don’t have high enough tension to do it in cloth on a warp-weighted loom, which is the only kind of loom for which we have scanty evidence, or any kind of evidence in the western half of Anatolia until very late. So that also suggests that those are not textile patterns, although they may be mat patterns.