SILK

For a very long time, historians of the ancient world believed that the first fabric created by human hands was woolen. Firstly, this myth was supported by the Greek classics, who together called wool the oldest and therefore the best, simple and honest way to protect the human body from the vagaries of the climate. Secondly, it seemed logical - skins, furs, leather, the next step is wool, at least felted from it. However, this belief was not confirmed by the peoples caught by observers in a state close to primitive: wool was practically unknown to most of them, since domestication of animals was unknown, but almost everyone knew how to weave clothes from flax fiber and threads of other plant origins, which was traditionally explained by cultural borrowing from more developed tribes. The oldest bone needles that have come down to us date back to about thirty thousand years before our era, and it was long believed that they were used exclusively for sewing skins with the thinnest strips of leather.

This is how the teaching of the history of fabrics to students was customary until the 21st century.

"It is assumed that the belt, which can be considered the foundation of the costume, appeared approximately 35,000 to 30,000 years ago. It was used to secure animal skins on the human body. The presence of belts can be seen in female Paleolithic statuettes. Sewn clothing was not found during this period. Between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, the first bone awls and needles with eyes were created by humans. For example, in a Paleolithic burial site in Kostenki on the Don River, scrapers, awls, and a bone needle with an eye were discovered. Thus, the first clothing made of sewn tendons using skins and fur emerges."iNatalia Tsvetkova, "History of Textile Art and Costume"

But first, in one of the caves of the prehistoric inhabitants of the territory now known as the Czech Republic, the oldest thread made of nettle was found, which was dated to 25-29 thousand years BC. This thread, which disrupted the usual chronological order of things, caused many disputes and was wisely forgotten for a while. Then, in 2009, Georgian archaeologist Eliso Kvavadze and her colleagues, who were studying the Dzudzuana cave, released a report that contained information about linen fibers found in layers dating back to 30,000 BC, bearing traces of cutting, twisting, trimming, and most surprisingly, dyeing. This is what Kassia St. Clair writes about in her book “The Golden Thread."

“Although most of the fibers were gray, black, or turquoise, there were also yellow, red, violet, green, khaki, and even pink ones. This indicated that people were well acquainted with the dyeing properties of plants and other dyes. Two older layers, representing periods around 32,000 and 19,000 years ago, contained the most colored fibers. In one of the layers, out of 488 linen fibers found, fifty-eight were dyed.”

The stunning vision of prehistoric people emerging from the cave in multi-colored linen clothing stands in such a sharp contrast to established stereotypes that not only mass culture but also popularizers have not yet reacted much to this information.

Moreover, linen was considered purely Egyptian, a very late and unique invention, one of the foundations of the prosperity and development of the Nile civilization. The Egyptians revered their linen as a sacred blessing, worshiping it in both its growing and woven forms and wrapping their dead in linen strips for guaranteed resurrection. The Greeks, actively importing linen, held linen fabrics as beautiful but corrupting indulgences, as these fabrics, according to the beliefs of the polis moralists, were poorly suited for protecting the body from cold and rain, and rather exposed than covered women and were a testament to the decadence of people who wore them, while our ancestors wore simple, sturdy wool, and so on and so forth.

Many historians still don't understand why people of the Paleolithic era needed textiles made of plant fibers, a sentiment that ancient Greeks would have agreed with deep down. Such fabrics were suitable for residents of well-built villages with warm homes, for those who worked on well-tended fields, and certainly for city dwellers. But running through the forest with a stone axe after a buffalo, by all the laws of the genre, would have been much more comfortable in dense animal hide than in thin canvas that could be pierced by any thorn or twig.

It seems that all of us will soon have to radically rethink our ideas about life in the late Paleolithic and push the dawn of civilization deeper into the past.

And perhaps the history of silk will also grow by a dozen or so millennia. Because if the inhabitants of Dzudzuana were content with linen fabrics, what prevented their Proto-Chinese contemporaries from coming to similar conclusions about the delicate threads that could be spun from the abundant cocoons of mulberry and oak silk moths, or the atlas moth?

According to Chinese legends, the idea of obtaining thread from cocoons was conceived by the wife of the first mythical emperor of China, the ancestor of all Chinese people, Huangdi, who lived 2600 years before our era. His wife's name was Xiling. One day, the empress was drinking tea under a mulberry treeialso known as a silkworm tree when an ugly cocoon from an unpleasant-looking caterpillar fell into her cup of hot tea. The sticky substance that binds the cocoon together melted in the hot liquid, and in the hands of the empress remained a ball of the finest, weightless, shiny threads.

The empress taught all her daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters to spin silk iusing three threads for the thinnest and twenty-five threads for the coarsest and to weave fabrics from it. For this, she was later revered in China as the heavenly patroness of sericulture and weaving, merging with the widespread image of the Heavenly Weaver separated from her beloved Herdsman and only once a year rushing to meet him across a bridge made of forty magpies.

Reality turned out to be cooler than the myth, at least by a thousand years - the oldest remains of silk clothes found in ancient Chinese tombs date back to the fourth millennium BC. Even silk swaddling clothes have been discovered in which dead infants were buried.

Another famous myth, of European origin, tells how in the sixth century AD, two Nestorian monks managed to steal the heavily guarded secret of silk production in China, smuggled out silkworm eggs hidden in their staffs, and brought their loot to Constantinople. But, truth be told, they may not have had to try so hard. First of all, silk was also produced in Japan, Korea, India, Persia, and in Asian countries such as Sogdiana and Bactria. Secondly, almost any village girl over the age of five in southern China knew the ominous secrets of sericulture - growing mulberry trees, feeding silkworm larvae with green leaves, and unwinding boiled cocoons was a female occupation that virtually all Chinese women engaged in, from the daughters of emperors to the daughters of fishermen. In China, domestic weaving was also a women's activity (while in India it was almost entirely a male occupation, and there were even laws that specifically prohibited women from weaving except in cases "where weaving was necessary for them to support themselves"). But, of course, the Chinese had the most advanced technologies for silk processing, weaving, dyeing and finishing, and serious production facilities (where male weavers already worked), which obtained raw silk from the population and produced many unique, complex fabrics of the richest patterns and colors. No one could compare with China in this respect for a long time, and technologies like these couldn't be taken away in staffs, so Byzantine silk couldn't create full-fledged competition with Chinese silk for a very long time. In the 19th century, "real Chinese silk straight from China" cost about a hundred francs per meter, while Indian silk was valued at 15-20 francs per meter. At that time, the best silk faille created in Parisian manufactories cost seven to eight francs per meter. The millennia-old craftsmanship was very difficult to surpass even with modern machines.

By the way, it was exactly in the 19th century, during the Restoration period, a significant number of ancient estates in France, greatly fragmented by the Napoleonic Code, which abolished primogeniture and required all children, regardless of gender, to inherit equal shares, experienced a decline in size. These diminished estates became covered with mulberry tree groves. No other crop was as profitable as the mulberry tree, and the demand for it led to the establishment of new silk manufactories in the country.

So no, silk was not a closely guarded secret but rather one of the most common goods, often serving as a substitute for currency in Southeast Asia.

Silk cloth and measures of rice were the primary monetary units in ancient Japan, while in China, silk of various qualities was used alongside silver and gold to pay for goods that were too valuable to be assessed in heavy bundles of cheap bronze coins. Naturally, the state (when it was strong) tightly controlled the production, sale, and even the use of silk. In both China and Japan, wearing silk was practically forbidden for lower classes, while the upper classes distinguished themselves by the cut of their clothing and the richness of their fabrics. In Japan's Heian era (8th-11th century), for example, silk with patterns was allowed to be worn only by individuals of the fifth rank and above, while colored silk was permitted only for those of the sixth rank and above. As for commoners, they could wear silk garments only on special occasions. "Only on festival days they may be allowed to wear clothing of a light green color with a yellowish tinge, as if they were true courtiers. Oh, if only it were possible to never part with this garment! But alas, futile efforts: fabric without patterns looks shabby and unattractive," wrote Sei Shōnagon in "The Pillow Book."

Indeed, every medal has a flip side. While commoners had to wear coarse hemp fabrics or cotton jackets padded with cotton wadding, the noble class could allow wearing nothing but silk. Considering that Japan had a rather cold climate in the 8th-10th centuries, it is understandable why the aristocratic costume of that era consisted of layering 10-12 dresses on top of each other. However, even dresses padded with (silk!) wadding provided little protection for their noble wearers against nighttime frosts. Silk is extremely poor at retaining heat; it is a breathable fabric designed for hot climates. While Heian men could still find some relief by being able to move around, noble women huddled under silk blankets around feeble hearths in their paper palaces and succumbed to "chest pains" en masse. These pains were, of course, caused by delicate sensibilities and sensitive natures rather than chronic pneumonia and a range of common cold-related ailments.

In China, wealthy commoners would wear silk robes at home within their family circles, as appearing in clothing that did not correspond to their rank was severely punished during many eras. It resulted in an odd situation where a wealthy merchant could sit on silk cushions behind silk screens, write on silk paper under the light of silk adorned oil lampshades, but had to dress in appropriate, socially acceptable fabric when going outside.

Silk rolls were periodically distributed as allowances to soldiers, and silk was the standard form of remuneration for officials. The deliberate reduction of silk consumption by the Chinese was important for the empire's financial position. For millennia, silk had been the country's main export, generously filling its treasury. Before the Western "barbarians" developed a taste for tea and spices, before they learned to appreciate porcelain, they admired the luxury of silk brocade, the delicacy of silk tulle, fell in love with satin, and recognized the merits of dense shantung silk.

To appease the nagging "northern barbarian tribes" that bothered China, emperors preferred to offer "gifts," primarily consisting of carts loaded with silk. It wasn't because the Chinese army couldn't fend off the nomads; it was simply a matter of the palace administration's astute calculations. They reasonably believed that if such tribute cost ten times less than maintaining a proper army on their problematic borders, it was wiser to pay the tribute. This way, the savages themselves served as guards of the empire's frontiers, preventing competitors from accessing the feeding grounds. It is worth mentioning that such a policy sometimes led to catastrophes, such as the invasion and rebellion of one of the barbarian warlords, An Lushan, who drenched several provinces of China in blood in the 8th century.

As early as the 1st century BCE, silk began to be imported in large quantities to Rome. Just as the Greeks once criticized Egyptian linen, now Roman authors, starting with Seneca, condemned silk for the same reasons – it was impractical, encouraged luxury, stirred vanity, revealed more of women's bodies than it covered, and also depleted Rome's gold reserves. The Chinese at that time showed little interest in Roman goods, preferring instead the heavy precious metal over all those crude barbarians handcrafted items.

The Silk Road, which connected Asia and the Middle East and extended to Egypt, emerged somewhere in the third century BCE. After a couple of centuries, it reached Europe and for two thousand years, it functioned not just as a network of roads. It was a true river of cultural transmission, bringing civilization, knowledge, and technology to the most remote corners, giving birth to magnificent cities in the heart of deserts, blending languages and peoples, and uniting humanity at least in something for the first time.

We still cannot fully understand and assess the impact that this trade path had on humanity as a whole. Such vast phenomena are difficult to comprehend and quantify.

This path existed thanks to a single commodity, silk. Let us reiterate that no other product was in such high demand and so convenient for transportation: lightweight, precious, and desirable. Everything else, such as cotton, dyes, books, exquisite and not-so-exquisite bondmaids, Arabian steeds, sable, astrolabes, Toledo steel, pepper, and nails were a mere addition, or simply supplements. Silk traveled westward, while gold or rarely silver flowed eastward. The mines of Egypt, Spain, Silesia, Denmark, the Carpathians, Saxony, Moldavia, and others enriched the countries of Southeast Asia with precious metals, which they lacked. Indian gold, long known in those regions, was insufficient for the creation of comprehensive monetary systems, and the Indians were not as interested in goods from China since they had their own silk, as it was mentioned before. On the other hand, the gold of the West helped the ancient empire reshape its economy from a predominantly barter system to a commodity-money production. Eventually, the accumulated gold reserves in that part of the world transformed into a fairy tale, enticing Western conquerors with the treasures of the East. Many English gentlemen, who grew rich from the East India Company, would have been surprised to learn that the guineas sent to them by the Bank of England were once coins that splendid Junias of Rome and Theodoras of Byzantium used to pay for their magnificent attires made of fabric as weightless as air and as radiant as the sun.