ABSTRACT
FABRIC Ancient clothing employed a wide variety of fabric types. However, ancient definitions tend to derive from the appearance of the textile, rather than techniques or weave-types, such as TWILL, BROCADE: literary evidence generally eschews technical terms, while pre-industrial production was essentially unstandardized – even large WEAVING-shops employed handLOOMS. Nevertheless, there was a spectrum of fabric types, in terms of quality, composition, weight and purpose. Although we can rarely put names or pictures to various fabrics, it is essential to realize that they existed: that ancient TEXTILE MANUFACTURE encompassed a very wide variety of skills and techniques, creating almost any desired effect, from extreme fineness and TRANSPARENCY, to ribbed, stretchy, heavy or WATERPROOF. The most common material was sheep’s wool (erion, lana), made into WOVEN fabrics and FELT, of which a wide variety of colours and qualities were available. Goats’ hair was also made into fabric used for heavy-duty capes (see cilicium, sisyra) and also for socks. LINEN (linos, linum) was the next most common material. SILK (bombacyna, serikos) mostly imported from China, was also used for lightweight cloth, worn by both sexes, but seen as rather decadent and effeminate for men. Silk was very expensive – equal to gold, by weight – and usually, like COTTON, mixed with other FIBRES (SHA
Aurelian 45.5). Various LUXURY textiles were also available, often involving purple, gold and silk: gold lamé cloth was already used in Rome’s regal period and there are remains of cloth using gold in early Etruscan tombs. Attalic cloth also used gold EMBROIDERY.
