The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous ... - Cd3wd.com

SILK BY THE ANCIENTS.
The silken fleece empurpled for the loom,
Rivall'd the hyacinth in vernal bloom.
Odyssey, iv.
In the hieroglyphics over persons employed with the spindle
on the Egyptian monuments, it is remarkable that the word
saht, which in Coptic signifies to twist, constantly occurs.
The spindles were generally of wood, and in order to increase
their impetus in turning, the circular head was occasionally of
gypsum, or composition : some, however, were of a light plait-
ed work, made of rushes, or palm leaves, stained of various
colors, and furnished with a loop of the same materials, for
securing the twine after it was wound*. Sir Gardner Wilkin-
son found one of these spindles at Thebes, with some of the
linen thread upon it, and is now in the Berlin Museum.
Theocritus has given us a very striking proof of the pleas-
ure which the women of Miletus took in these employments
for, when he went to visit his friend Nicias, the Milesian physician,
to whom he had previously addressed his eleventh and
thirteenth Idylls, he carried with him an ivory distaff as a
present for Theugenis, his friend's wife. He accompanied his
gift with the following verses, which modestly commend the
matron's industry and virtue, and, at the same time, throw an
interesting hght on the domestic economy of the ladies of Mi-
letus :
O Distaff, friend to warp and woof,
Minerva's gift in man's behoof,
Whom careful housewives still retain.
And gather to their households' gain
With me repair, no vulgar prize.
Where the famed towers of Nileus riset,
Where Cytherea's swayful power
Is worship'd in the reedy bower.
* The ordinary distaff does not occur in these subjects, but we may conclude
they had it. Homer mentions one of gold, given to Helen by " Alcandra the
wife of Polybus," who lived in Egj'ptian Thebes.—Od. iv. 131.
t Miletus was called " the towers of Nileus," from its having been founded by
Nileus, the son of the celebrated king Codrus, who devoted himself for the siifcty
of Athens. Nileus was so indignant at the abolition of royalty on his father's
death, that he migrated to Ionia.
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