A new book, Weaving for Eternity: Ancient Egyptian Textiles, examines significant collections of ancient Egyptian textiles held in museums across the north of England, according to a review published by The Past.
Textiles have long remained in the shadow of more conspicuous archaeological finds, the review notes. Monumental sculpture, decorated coffins, and jewellery tend to attract the greater share of attention, both in museum displays and in scholarship. Cloth and the fragments that survive from it are quieter objects, easily overlooked, and yet they carry a wealth of information that harder and more durable materials cannot.
The book sets out to redress that imbalance by drawing on collections in the north of England. In doing so it turns to material that is often kept in store rather than on show, and it treats these surviving textiles as a serious source for understanding the ancient world rather than as a supplement to more familiar categories of find.
As the review explains, these often-overlooked artefacts offer vital insights across a range of fields. They shed light on technology, on the practical business of spinning, weaving, and finishing cloth, and on the tools and skills that lay behind it. They speak to economics, since cloth was produced, valued, and exchanged, and its manufacture involved labour and organisation. They touch on religion, on dress, and on the ways in which fabric was used both in daily life and in the preparation of the dead.
That breadth is part of the point. A single length of surviving linen can connect to the fields where flax was grown, to the households and workshops where it was worked, to the wardrobes of the living, and to the wrapping of the dead. Approached carefully, textiles bring together strands of evidence that are usually studied apart, which is why their relative neglect has been a real loss to the wider picture of ancient Egyptian life.
By concentrating on holdings in the north of England, the book also draws attention to the depth of Egyptological material in regional British museums. Collections of this kind are often less visited than the great national institutions, but they preserve objects of considerable importance, and textiles are among the most fragile and most demanding of them to conserve and display.
The full review appears on The Past. For readers who would like to move from the objects to the words that accompanied them, the Hierolyte app teaches the hieroglyphic script from the ground up, so that inscriptions on coffins, stelae, and everyday objects become something you can begin to read for yourself.