Author: Apiladey ApilSin
Date: Apr 26, 2003 - 05:17

For this topic, the best reference I know of is Florence Eloise Petzel's book, Textiles of Ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt (1987). Most books give many pictures of tatters of ancient cloth from various museums, but very little information to tell you how they were made. This book is just the opposite. There's not a single photo or illustration in the whole book.....just information, more than 200 pages of it, covering all aspects. 129 pages are on Persia and Mesopotamia. The following info is from it:

Wool was the most important textile in Mesopotamia, and a pre-ceramic settlement (9,000 BC) named Zawi in Kurdistan may have domesticated a now extinct red sheep, which was a form of the wild Ovis orientalis. More in the times when cities had been developed, we had three kinds of sheep in Mesopotamia. The two best grades of wool came from the fat-tailed sheep. It was also the only sheep known from Babylon and Assyria. They had wool instead of fur, long fat tails, small erect ears, and the males had heavy, spirally coiled horns about the ears. The mountain sheep, which came from upper Mesopotamia, produced 4th, 5th, and occasionally 3rd quality wool from prehistoric times through Early Dynastic periods, then became extinct. It had short, lean tails. The Uli-gi sheep supplied 4th and 5th class cloth. It had hair rather than wool, pendant ears and short tails. The males were maned and had corkscrew horns. They were around from 3200 till 2200 BC.

The fibers were gained by plucking or shearing. Which method was used varied with the time and place. Plucking was used in the Ur III period and probably continued up to Persian times. On the other hand, an Akkadian text refers to shearing. A Neo-Babylonian text describes knives or shears which seem designed for shearing sheep. For much of the time, this job was performed on the basis of gender. Women did it in the Ur III period, while men did it in the Old Babylonian period. It was time consuming, requiring more than a thousand people to pluck the royal herds of Hammurabi. The plucking involved laying out a cane mat to keep the wool off the dirt. In one source, a leather device was used to pull on the wool, yet, in another source, a comb with a handle was used for it. A palm-whisk was often among the tools.

It was then sorted into grades based on fineness, evenness, and rarely, staple length. This sorted wool was then labelled for which kind of sheep it came from, what kind of cloth it was intended for (such as wool of the mountain sheep for 3rd grade guz-za cloth), and also for what use it was intended (such as warp as opposed to filling yarns). Wool of the uli-gi sheep was not sorted, since it would only be used for course grades of cloth.