This elaborately printed textile fragment is embellished with eight-pointed stars dotted with indigo interiors, diamond shapes, and curving tendrils which emerge from larger tear-drop motifs—some with pearled borders. The ornamentation of the textile fragment shares similar stylistic conventions to Jain manuscript paintings which were produced around the same time during the fourteenth century. This links the textile’s production site to the province of Gujarat, located in western India, which was an important textile production center as early as the tenth century.
Retrieved from the burial grounds of Fustat, Egypt during the early twentieth century, this textile fragment would have once formed a larger burial shroud. Over the centuries, Gujarat became well-known for its vibrantly-colored printed textiles which were widely exported around the Indian Ocean. This textile fragment reflects the global interconnectivity of the Indian Ocean maritime trade network and serves as evidence for Fustat, Egypt as one of the major markets for these popular Gujarati textiles during the fourteenth century.
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Artwork Details
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Title:Fragment of Textile with a Forested Landscape
Date:14th century
Geography:Made in India, Gujarat. Found Egypt, near Fustat
Medium:Cotton, plain weave; printed or painted, mordant and resist dyed
Dimensions:L. 16 in. (40.6 cm) W. 12 1/4 in. (31.1 cm)
Classification:Textiles-Painted and/or Printed
Credit Line:Purchase, V. Everit Macy Gift, 1930
Accession Number:30.112.42
Two Textile Fragments (nos. 30.112.42 and 2005.407)
Western India has been supplying dyed and painted cotton textiles to the world since antiquity, as witnessed by the first-century Greek geography The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The Gujarati trade in dyed cotton textiles to the Red Sea markets of western Asia can be traced archaeologically to the ninth and tenth centuries. The largest finds have been at Fustat, the first capital of Egypt under Arab rule, which was established in 641. The city prospered until the conquering Fatimids replaced it in 969 with Cairo, immediately north of Fustat. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, under the Mamluks, the early Red Sea port of Qusair al-Qadim was revived and linked to trade centers such as Qasr Ibrim and Gebel Adda in Nubia. That these sites have all yielded fragments of Indian cotton confirms an active trading system that linked the ports of Egypt with western India. The additional excavation at Qusair al-Qadim of shards of burnished earthenware inscribed in Tamil points to early commercial links with southern India, the principal source of the world’s black pepper.
The largest corpus of Gujarati textiles abroad has been recorded from the two extremities of the Indian Ocean trading system—Fustat in Lower Egypt and the islands of eastern Indonesia engaged in the Moluccan spice trade. Tome Pires, the Portuguese writer and diplomat, reported that this trade was still prospering in the early sixteenth century.[1] Such an extraordinary geographical distribution of a single trading commodity was achieved through the agency of Muslim Gujarati merchants, who traded systematically across the Indian Ocean, exchanging Indian cotton goods for the Indonesian spices so in demand. These spices were in turn traded on to the great marts of the Arab and Mediterranean worlds, as well as to China.
The first textile fragment from Fustat (no. 30.112.42) once formed a burial shroud, along with numerous other such fragments retrieved from the Fatimid-period burial grounds of Old Cairo early in the twentieth century. The second example (no. 2005.407), measuring a spectacular sixteen feet in length, was collected in eastern Indonesia, where it served an entirely different function, as an exhibition cloth to be displayed at ceremonies marking rites of passage.
Both works can be dated to the fourteenth century on the basis of associated radiocarbon-14 dating,[2] a dating compatible with stylistically analogous art forms from Gujarat. Contemporaneous dated manuscript paintings, principally Jain, share the stylization conventions for trees and leaves, the clearly differentiated species, and the white-pearl frames. The textiles are limited in their color range, with (mordant-dyed) madder red and (resist-dyed) indigo, combined with resist-reserved white, completing the designs.
John Guy in [Ekhtiar, Soucek, Canby, and Haidar 2011]
Footnotes:
1. "Cambay [Gujarat] chiefly stretches out her two arms, with her right arm she reaches out towards Aden, and with the other towards Malacca . . . the trade of Cambay is extensive and comprises cloth of many kinds." Pires, Tome. The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, an Account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515, and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, Rutter of a Voyage in the Red Sea, Nautical Rules, Almanack and Maps: Written and Drawn in the East Before 1515, Transl. from the Portuguese Ms in the Bibliothèque de la Chambre des Députés, Paris. Edited by Armando Cortesao. Hakluyt Society, Works Ser. 2, 89–90. London, 1944, pp. 42, 46.
2. Guy, John. Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East. New York, 1998, appendix p. 186.
[ Art market, Near East, until 1930; sold to MMA through Maurice Dimand]
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800," September 9, 2013–January 5, 2014, no. 3A.
Dimand, Maurice S. "A Recent Gift of Near Eastern Art." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, o.s., vol. 26 (March 1931). p. 12.
Ekhtiar, Maryam, Priscilla P. Soucek, Sheila R. Canby, and Navina Haidar, ed. Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1st ed. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. no. 242A, pp. 340, 346–47, ill. p. 346 (color).
Peck, Amelia, ed. Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. no. 3A, pp. 141–42, ill. (color).
Rosenfield, Yael, and Nobuko Shibayama. "The Color Red: Madder Dyes as Determinants of Provenance in a Group of Kalamkari Textiles." The Textile Museum Journal vol. 47 (2020). p. 97, ill. table 2 (color).
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