Posted by Steve Price on May 04, 1999 at 19:47:20:
In Reply to: Re: What about some other matters? Materials posted by Yon Bard on May 02, 1999 at 09:15:48:
Dear Folks,
Of course, nobody can use materials that they can't get, but then the question comes up, where and how did these people get some of the materials that they used? Wool is pretty obvious - they raised sheep.
But how about cotton and silk? Did they get most or all that they used by trading (or raiding!) for the raw materials, or did they get their hands on silk and cotton textiles and unravel them for the yarn? This was a very common practice in subSaharan Africa in the 19th and much of the 20 th century, and most of the silk in "Kente cloth" (does anyone out there know enough about these wonderful things to set up a discussion Salon about them?) comes from European textiles that the Ashante unraveled.
The Tekke Turkmen used Indian (and, according to my not-too-reliable memory, Russian) cotton block print fabrics to line their chyrpys, so we can be pretty sure that they had cotton textiles from elsewhere. And scraps of what appear to be Uzbek ikat chapans can also be found in various Turkmen trappings.
Does anyone have any fairly reliable information on what Turkmen and/or NW Persian tribal folks used as sources for cotton and silk?
Regards,
Steve Price