Fragment of a Hanging

Textile fragment

This fragment, another example of a Late Antique decorative household textile, illustrates a number of interesting technical points. With one selvage and one edge preserved, as well as its ornamental composition consisting of two stripes, a roundel and a corner panel, its size suggests that it is a corner piece of either a curtain or a bed cover. It is made of a linen cloth finished with an à-joured (openwork) and fringed edge. The decoration is in a tapestry weave in dark purple wool and linen with much of the patterning done with a flying shuttle. The two horizontal stripes carry a stylized scroll with fruit and leaf motifs between scalloped borders. Another scroll fills the border of the roundel. More can be seen in the fragmentary L-shaped panel that was once the largest decorative element, serving as either a corner gammadion (in the shape of the Greek letter gamma) or an angular U-shaped ornament applied across the width of the textile. At present, the composition consists of two main parts: one is an L-shaped center framed by a vegetable scroll and filled with three fields of an elaborate interlacing; the other is a pointed oval tip covered with a design of overlapping circles enclosed by a simple border of connected disks.

All four tapestry elements of this piece were made seperately following different practices and then applied over reserved unwoven areas in the linen cloth instead of being woven-in as inserts, as is the case with most of the domestic textiles exhibited (MMA 89.18.151 and MMA 90.5.899). Otherwise, patterning of these ornaments contains the same repertory of motifs observed on many monochrome tapestry decorations, but especially those circumstantially associated with the finds from Upper Egypt and Akhmim, and to some extent with those from Saqqara in Lower Egypt (MMA 89.18.151 and MMA 90.5.899 ). In this respect the similarity between the L-shaped panel of the Metropolitan Museum piece and the interlace designs of a wide neckband with clavi on a tunic fragment in Leningrad (no. 11620) is important since the tunic almost certainly came from Upper Egypt. Representations of tunics decorated with similar large panels, either as segmenta, neckbands, or clavi in several early- to mid-4th century monuments such as the tomb of Aelia Arisuth in Gargaresh, the tomb of Trebius Justus in Rome, and a silver plate with Constantius II from Kerč (Hermitage, Leningrad 1820/79), help to date the Leningrad tunic as well as this and other related textiles to the middle of the 4th century.

Anna Gonosova in [Friedman 1989]

Lily S. Place, Cairo (until 1921; gifted to MMA)

Providence, RI. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. "Beyond the Pharaohs: Egypt and the Copts in the 2nd to 7th Centuries A.D.," February 10, 1989–April 16, 1989, no. 182.

Friedman, Florence D. "Egypt and the Copts in the 2nd to 7th Centuries AD." In Beyond the Pharaohs. Providence, R.I.: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1989. no. 182, p. 268, ill. (b/w).