THE FABRIC OF GREECE

Textiles by the hands of Greek women

The fabric of Greece was woven by the hands of her women. Every square inch of cloth used over the millennia was the product of the daily and life long work of women's hands. As a little girl she was given her first spindle and often she was buried with one by her side. All Greek women were expected to be able to spin and weave. From the lowest woman of the market place to the highest of the aristocrats, each woman spun and wove. The looms of Greece could never be still if the need for cloth was to be met and the hands of her women could never be idle.

In the tomb of a rich and important woman excavated at Alaca Höyük in central Turkey, amidst all the fine jewelry was found a spindle made of gold and silver. The tombs is dated to the early bronze age ( mid third millennium ). Spinning and weaving was already a part of gender roles; it remains so to this day.

It is difficult to imagine the amount of labor devoted to the production of clothing in ancient Greece. If you look in your closet and around your home at the thousands of yards of fabric and consider the time which would be required to spin the yarns and weave the cloth standing at a loom, you shall only just begin to realize the life of a woman in ancient Greece.

In a society in which the activities of a woman were greatly restricted, spinning and weaving must have provided some relief from the tedium of confinement, as well as an opportunity for social gathering. Larger and more complicated pieces require the cooperative efforts of several women at once. An analysis of a complicated piece of fabric of the neolithic period in Switzerland proves that it was made by three women working on it at the same time and the great peplos woven annually for the statue of Athena took nine months of cooperation by a team of women who produced the 24 square feet of graphic tapestry. To this day, it is common in rural areas of eastern Europe for groups of women to come together in the winter months to weave elaborately patterned fabrics just as in older times women found companionship in the quilting bee.

It should be pointed out that the kind of weaving required of a woman depended very much upon her social status. As Penelope spent her days weaving an elaborate decorative tapestry, somewhere in that house lesser women had to be toiling at the many yards of plain cloth needed to maintain her lifestyle.

The creation of fabric is a time consuming and labor intensive activity. Raw wool shorn from sheep and delivered to the woman's door is just that, raw wool. From a pile of animal hairs to a fine fabric is a long and difficult journey which begins with cleaning the wool. All burs and foreign matter are removed by hand. Now the wool must be thoroughly washed to remove the dirt and animal fluids which coat the fibers. Once the clean wool has dried it is combed until blond untangled strands into the fluffy sausage shape so often depicted in Greek vase paintings. This now is the cleaned and carded wool ready to begin spinning.

The spinning wheel did not yet exist in antiquity, Yarn was originally twisted by hand a strand at a time. The most ancient of methods is the simplest; a length of fibers is held tightly at one end while it is rolled against the thigh with the other hand. As the fibers of the wool are twisted, their rough surfaces lock together to form a strand of yarn. it is unfortunately only a few inches long and not of much use. The obvious solution is to twist more fibers onto the end and joining the the two lengths together increase the length of the thread. Long lengths of yarn can be made this way. but the joining will be visible as thicker areas in the strand. This produces a rough , nubby, coarse, cloth which has a decorative texture , but is not very strong.

One continuous strand is far more desirable, but requires the introduction of some ancient tools and here we encounter the spindle. Though the spindle can be as simple as a stick, by the time of ancient Greece, it had become a more sophisticated tool. To the end of the spindle was added the spindle whorl, a heavy fly wheel often made of clay which allows the spindle to twirl like a top and thus twist the strands.

A second tool is necessary to spin in the ancient Greek manner and this is the very symbol of woman, the distaff. Again, it is little more than a long rod upon which a good supply of wool is attached.

It is with these two small and light weight hand tools that all of the many miles of woolen thread in Greece were made. With these simple things the women of Greece clothed and decorated Hellas. Indeed, to this day, many women of Greece continue to use the spindle and the distaff.

I can state empirically that the task is not as easy as it sounds. Some years ago, in researching this subject, I assembled all the needed materials and attempted to spin. This is an acquired skill which requires many hours of practice to perfect. Holding the distaff with the wool in one hand, you must begin a thread by hand and then giving the spindle a twirl, drop it. As it continues to spin, you feed the fibers onto the developing strand from the distaff at a perfectly even rate in order to produce a long and regular thread. The way the fibers are prepared and arranged on the distaff and the and the rate at which they are added to the thread will dictate the kind of thread produced allowing the spinner to create anything from a thin strong cord to a soft fluffy yarn.

When you have spun enough thread, and that is a prodigious amount, you must then ply the threads before you can use them as they will twist themselves into an unusable tangle if you do not. This is a simple task. Two lengths are merely twisted together in a direction opposed to the original twist. This produces a thread twice the thickness of the original which will lie flat and can be twisted upon a spool.

After all these hours of labor, you now will have part of the thread you need to begin to weave. Part, because two distinctly different kinds of thread are required to weave a serviceable kind of fabric. You may start now all over again. If, like most, you have made the weft threads first, you must now begin to spin the warp threads.

The warp of the fabric consists of thinner, stronger threads which run horizontally through the cloth. Being thinner they are stronger as they are more tightly twisted. This provides the strength need to make the fabric more durable.

After you have created all the thread required, you may proceed to build the loom to the proper size of the cloth. In ancient Greece the most common type of loom was the vertical loom attached to the wall or hung from the rafters. in its simplest form it is merely a rectangular frame to which the weft threads, each cut to the proper length, are attached. groups of these threads were than attached to free swinging weights, usually made of clay, at the bottom. Work was done standing and passing the thread, attached to a shuttle, over and under the warp threads. This was facilitated by the heddle, a device which raised a pre selected group of warp threads away from the others allowing the weaver to insert a line of thread across the entire width of the fabric in one pass. Thus, the fabric grew one thread at a time.

The variety of weaves made possible by this simple device is endless and then, as now, specific weavers may have developed a recognizable signature weave as well as trading weave patterns. This we cannot know as so little fabric has survived and no complete large pieces. With the production of cloth being so labor intensive, garments would have been patched and repaired, used and reused, until they were no longer salvageable and even then some might have been unwoven to use the tediously made thread.

The production of cloth would remain the responsibility of women for 20,000 years. during which countless millions of women were to devote a large part of their lives to the task. it would not be until the industrial revolution and the building of giant steam powered looms that women would even begin to be freed from the spindle and the loom. In early medieval times, the introduction of the spinning wheel, possibly from China, would speed up the process, but still women gave much of their lives to spinning and weaving. In many parts of the world today women are still at looms much like the ones from which they fashioned the fabric of Greece.