Plain Weave with Supplementary Wefts (KM 13376)
Thousands of small textile scraps were excavated at Karanis, Egypt. Many came from houses, while others came from streets or granaries. Many more were found in trash dumps, including this small fragment of woven wool fabric.
This fragment is decorated with two bands of dark reddish-purple weft, each of which includes floral designs created with a technique called weft-wrapping. Similar to embroidery, weft-wrapping can be used to create elaborate designs and textures on plain-woven fabrics. Many textile fragments from Karanis are decorated this way, and in all cases, the supplemental weft is made from undyed linen. It is almost always applied over a dark blue or purple weft for a dramatic color contrast.
As seen in the MSI images, the color of the purple weft comes from both madder and indigo dyes; the former has a pink luminescence in the UVL image, while the latter shows as bright red in the IRRFC image and as white in the MBR image. The undyed wool warp and weft and the undyed linen weft-wraps look almost identical in visible light but are clearly seen as two different fiber types in the UVL image, where the wool has a bluish cast and the linen shows as dark beige.
Tapestry Weave (KM 10534)
This small fragment of wool tapestry has an animal design and is woven in muted brown, yellow, pink, and purple. Despite its small size and rather scruffy appearance, it reveals the technological sophistication of ancient textile workers.
Two techniques are used to create the design: slit tapestry, where wefts wrap around adjacent warps, and eccentric weaving, in which wefts are not perpendicular to the warp but instead run at an angle to it, sometimes wrapping around other wefts. What animal do we see here, exactly? It’s hard to say; maybe it has four legs and a tail, maybe it has fins, or maybe it’s simply meant to suggest a small creature.
Both the pink and purple yarns are created from a blend of madder and indigo dyes, yet the specific hue—pink versus purple—was produced after dyeing. Under magnification, it is possible to see that the pink yarns surrounding the animal are primarily made up of reddish-pink, madder-dyed fibers, with just a few light-blue, indigo-dyed fibers. In the purple areas of the animal, however, nearly 50% of the fibers are dark blue.
Based on our research to date, all examples of pink and purple yarns in the Karanis collection use this technique. It suggests that for these yarns, dyers were working with wool that had been processed but not yet spun. The dyed wool would then be blended to create varying colors. This could be done by combing the processed wool together prior to spinning or by spinning the two colors together. Either way, a high degree of precision during both dyeing (to get full penetration of the dye through the processed wool) and post-dye processing (like combing or spinning) would have been necessary to produce consistently colored yarn.
Compound Weave (KM 22561)
This slim but sturdy strip of wool fabric from Karanis represents one of the very few compound weave structures in the Kelsey Museum’s collection. Compound weaves involve more than one set of warps or wefts being used in a sequence to produce a pattern. This fragment is double-faced, with a checkerboard pattern of alternating colors. It is a weave structure known as taqueté, where two wefts interface so that one shows on the front and the other on the back. The warp is spaced relatively far apart to accommodate the double wefts, and the resulting fabric is also thicker and sturdier than a single-weft fabric would be. Fabric of this weight might have been used as a furnishing fabric—for example, to cover cushions or serve as a rug or wall hanging.
Many Kelsey Museum records describe this fabric as a red and black checkerboard pattern, but the “black” yarns are actually a very dark blue; both the IRRFC and the MBR images clearly indicate a deep indigo dye. The blue coloration is also apparent when the fragment is examined closely, especially under magnification. At even a small distance, however, the blue wefts’ placement next to and above the red creates the optical illusion of black.
Goat Hair Fabric with Dyed Weft Band (KM 11567)
More than 100 of the textile fragments from Karanis are made of goat hair. These fabrics are thick, rough-textured, and sturdy. This relatively plain section of woven goat hair fabric was found in a house, inside an interesting room—the same room where the wall painting fragment KM 26982 was found (see the wall paintings case studies).
Although many of the goat hair textiles are not dyed, the decorative weft band in this one is. Two warps have been paired to create the patterned band, in which the red and yellow wefts have been alternated and tightly beaten to create the effect of stripes. This simple technique dresses up an otherwise drab piece of serviceable cloth.
As seen in the UVL image, the red yarn is dyed with madder, which fluoresces pink, and the yellow yarn is dyed with a yellow colorant that shows up as pale yellow in both the UVL and IRRFC images.
Sprang Caps (KM 13532, KM 13862)
Some of the most brightly colored textiles from Karanis are women’s caps made with a technique called sprang. Unlike woven cloth, which is made from interwoven warp and weft yarns, sprang uses only warp. The warp yarns are held in place on a small frame and twisted around each other to produce a stretchy, net-like fabric (see this video for a fun demonstration of how ancient sprang caps were made and worn). The resulting caps are shaped like small bags, with a drawstring closure at the top. They were worn much like a hairnet would be today, and their function as hair coverings is known from finding them in situ in burial contexts. The sprang caps from Karanis are special in part because they were found not in graves but in a variety of domestic contexts across the town.
The caps in the Kelsey’s collection show a consistent palette of three main colors—blue, red, and yellow—with dark blue usually making up the background color (as seen in cap KM 13532). Many small fragments of caps also show green and orange used as accent colors alongside the red and yellow (as in KM 13682).
MSI indicates indigo as the colorant for the blue yarn and madder for the red and orange. Identification of the yellow will require more research, although it is likely to be weld based on findings in other collections of similar origin and date. The green dye is a mixture of indigo and yellow colorants. Unlike pink and purple yarns in the Karanis collection—all of which are made of fibers dyed blue or red and then combined in varying quantities (see the case study for KM 10534)—the green yarn appears to have been double-dyed. Ancient texts talk about producing green by dyeing yarn or cloth first with indigo and then with yellow.
Basket Fragment (KM 3364)
Hundreds of plaited and coiled palm leaf baskets were excavated at Karanis, and many are highly patterned. This patterning can occur in the weave structure or be achieved by dyeing some of the palm leaves. This fragment, which is from a conical, plaited basket, shows both types of decoration. Undyed strips of palm seem to float on a background of red and brown diagonal stripes, making a horizontal pattern of large, nested rectangles.
MSI indicates that the red color is produced with madder, which luminesces orange-pink in the UVL image and shows up as yellow in the IRRFC image. The dark brown appears to be a tannin, based on its dark appearance in the UVL image and its orange-brown appearance in the IRRFC image. Madder and tannin appear as dyes on many of the basket fragments we have examined thus far.