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Bringing the Holy Land Home: The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece

Tunic Ornament (linen and wool) produced in Egypt (fifth-sixth century CE)

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What is this? By Sean Gilsdorf

This is a piece of cloth, originally part of a tunic. It’s fairly small: only five inches (12.7 cm) tall—around the height of a cellphone—and four inches (10.6 cm) wide. The fragment depicts a battle between man and beast, with two hunters fighting lions. The lions leap, mouths agape, toward the hunters, who face them with swords at the ready. This small scene is framed by a black oval, with curling vines decorating the corners. The art is very stylized, almost cartoon-like, and both lions and men are roughly formed, with large eyes.
Where was this tunic ornament made? By Sean Gilsdorf
This textile fragment likely was produced in Egypt, although we do not know the exact location where it was made. For many years, scholars assumed that linen-and-wool items like this were examples of "local" or "domestic" textile production, deriving from Upper (southern) Egyptian cities such as Panopolis (modern-day Akhmim), while those made from silk originated in northern cities such as Alexandria, which were centers of the Hellenistic and Mediterranean trade networks linking the Roman Mediterranean to Sassanid Persia, Central Asia, India, and China. As art historian Thelma Thomas has observed, this "tendency to separate out silks from other materials and the silk industry from production of and trade in wool, linen, and cotton persisted for nearly a century." More recent research, however, indicates that weaving, garment production, and other textile work in varying levels of sophistication, with varying forms of decoration and in varied materials, took place throughout Egypt. These textiles, moreover—whether in cotton, linen and wool, or silk—circulated around the late Roman world and beyond.
When was this tunic ornament made? By Sean Gilsdorf
This woven decoration, like the tunic of which it was a part, likely was created in the fifth or sixth century CE. During this time, Egypt was a province of the Eastern Roman (later known as the "Byzantine") Empire. The period of Egyptian history from c. 300 to c. 700 CE sometimes is referred to as the Coptic Era—a reference to the native Christian Church, whose liturgy and scripture employed the native Egyptian language (Coptic) rather than Greek, and which operated independently from the Byzantine church hierarchy from the mid-fifth century CE. During this time, Egypt enjoyed close cultural, religious, and economic relationships not only with its Greek- and Syriac-speaking northern neighbors, but also with Nubia and Aksum (Ethiopia) to the south and Persia and Central Asia to the east. Egyptian textiles from the period reflect this multi-cultural milieu, combining ancient Egyptian and Greek mythological themes, Persian motifs and scenes (such as the one seen here), and Christian symbols.
How was this tunic ornament made? By Sean Gilsdorf

This fragment was originally part of a tunic, woven from wool and linen threads. Fabrics like this one were produced on looms, devices that allow an artisan to tightly weave together threads in a variety of patterns. Both upright (vertical) and horizontal looms were used by weavers in Egypt at the time this fabric was produced (sometime between 400 and 600 CE). In both types of looms, one long set of "warp" threads would be stretched out on a frame, kept under tension by rigid wooden beams; the weaver then would run another skein of "weft" back and forth through the warp threads to create the fabric. Designs were produced by placing the weft threads above and below the warp threads in set patterns, with the warp threads lifted up to form a space ("shed") through which the weft thread could be passed from side to side. This piece of cloth was produced with a "tapestry weave", meaning that most of the warp threads (here, made of linen) are covered by weft threads (here, light-colored linen and dark-colored wool) that produce the fabric's patterned surface.
Who made this tunic ornament? By Sean Gilsdorf

A local Egyptian weaver most likely made this textile. While Egypt often imported foreign fabrics (particularly silk), linen, cotton, and woolen thread was produced domestically. Egypt also was home to a vibrant textile industry, with many large-scale weaving houses able to produce tunics as well as other fabric goods, such as wall hangings and more elaborate garments. Over 150,000 examples of Egyptian cloth from the late antique and medieval period survive today in various museum collections, giving us some sense of the scope of Egyptian textile production in those centuries.
Why was this tunic ornament made, and how was it used? By Sean Gilsdorf
Egyptian tunics normally were made from linen or wool, and took a number of forms. The simplest, known variously as a kolobion or lebiton, had no sleeves and looked something like a cross between a modern-day t-shirt and tank top. It appears to have been standard apparel for laborers as well as monks, was woven in one piece, and featured only rudimentary (if any) decoration. Tunics with long loose-fitting sleeves (known as a dalmatikon) or long tight ones (known as a sticharion), normally sewn together from multiple pieces of cloth, were worn by both men and women. A rare surviving example of such a garment, now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, can be seen here. These tunics often were decorated with colored fabric bands known as clavi, geometric designs, or small decorative panels added to the front of the tunic, just above the waist, on the left and right side. The panels often featured stylized images of people—famous ones, like Achilles or a popular saint, or anonymous ones, like the men hunting lions on our object. Images of lions, and the lion hunt in particular, were central elements of Sasanian Persian artistic style, part of a "visual lingua franca found dispersed from Japan to Europe" during the Late Antique era. Such scenes were represented on garments as well as on wall hangings like the one seen here, produced in Egypt a few centuries later. In addition to its subject's symbolic association with characteristics such as strength, courage, virility, and rulership, therefore, this tunic ornament also indicated the wearer's participation in a cosmopolitan network of trade, style, and meaning linking Egypt to the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.
Where did this tunic ornament go? By Sean Gilsdorf
The vast majority of ancient tunics found in modern museums and collections (most of them surviving only as fragments) were originally discovered in, and sometimes stolen from, grave sites. When people in late Roman and Coptic Egypt buried their dead, they wrapped them in many layers of clothing, then tied a burial shroud around the body using cloth tapes or ribbons. Because of Egypt’s hot and dry climate, these fabrics often survived the intervening centuries in surprisingly good condition. Archaeologists began excavating Coptic burial sites in the late 1800s, and would often just cut out attractive or interesting parts of the clothing that they discovered within. This well may have been the case with our example, which was given to Harvard University in 1917 by the noted art historian, theorist, and collector Denman Waldo Ross. As a result, while we can guess what the rest of the original garment might have looked like, we do not know where it was found, or where it might have travelled beforehand.
The Egyptian tunic ornament: sources and further reading By Sean Gilsdorf
The Art of the Ancient Weaver: Textiles from Egypt (4th–12th Century AD) (Ann Arbor, 1980).

Textiles, Tools and Techniques: Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the Research Group “Textiles from the Nile Valley,” Antwerp, 4–6 October 2013, ed. Antoine De Moor, Cäcilia Fluck, and Petra Linscheid (Tielt, 2015).

Designing Identity: The Power of Textiles in Late Antiquity, ed. Thelma K. Thomas (Princeton, 2016).

Catalogue of the Textiles in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection, ed. Gudrun Bühl and Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Washington DC, 2019).

Matthew P. Canepa, "Textiles and Elite Tastes between the Mediterranean, Iran and Asia at the End of Antiquity," in Global Textile Encounters, ed. Marie-Louise Nosch, Zhao Feng, and Lotika Varadarajan (Oxford, 2015), 1-14.

Heleanor Feltham, "Lions, Silks and Silver: The Influence of Sasanian Persia," Sino-Platonic Papers 206 (2010): 1-50.

Béatrice Huber, "The Textiles of an Early Christian Burial from el-Kom el-Ahmar/Šaruna (Middle Egypt)," in Methods of Dating Ancient Textiles of the First Millennium AD from Egypt and Neighbouring Countries, ed. Antoine De Moor, Cäcilia Fluck, and Susanne Martinssen-Von Falck (Tielt, 2007), 36-69.

Anne Kwaspen, "Reconstruction of a Deconstructed Tunic," in Egyptian Textiles and Their Production: ‘Word’ and ‘Object’ (Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Periods), ed. Maria Mossakowska-Gaubert, ed., (Lincoln NE, 2020), 60-68.

Maria Mossakowska-Gaubert, "Tunics Worn in Egypt in Roman and Byzantine Times: The Greek Vocabulary," in Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD, ed. Salvatore Gaspa, Cécile Michel, and Marie-Louise Nosch (Lincoln NE: 2017): 321-345.

Annemarie Stauffer, “Weaving,” in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, ed. G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge MA, 1999), 746-747.

Thelma K. Thomas, "Coptic and Byzantine Textiles Found in Egypt: Corpora, Collections, and Scholarly Perspectives," in Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300–700, ed. Roger S. Bagnall (Cambridge, 2007), 137-162.

John Peter Wild, "The Roman Horizontal Loom," American Journal of Archaeology 91/3 (1987): 459-471.