Furnishing fabric, hanging in linen with wool tapestry woven decoration, Egypt, Sheikh Shata, Late Antique, possibly 5th-6th Century

Fragment from a hanging or curtain. The body fabric is undyed plain woven linen, decorated in tapestry weave with a pair of pillars with a vertical row of blossoms between them.

The left-hand pillar is woven in blue-purple wool, with decoration picked out in undyed linen thread. Its capital is decorated with a floral pattern of vine leaves within lozenges, and the shaft and stepped base are covered with an interlace pattern. The right hand pillar, in brighter wool, has a base in the form of an inverted column, a shaft covered with interlaced bands, and a capital with a foliated pattern. This pillar is much more polychrome, with decoration in red, blue, pink, yellow and green wools.

Above each pillar is a medallion containing a head. The medallions are in yellow with a red border; the heads have a purple outline filled in with pink and touches of red. The row of blossoms down the middle of the hanging is in red, yellow and green wool.

There are traces of heavy staining from bodily decomposition across the fabric of the textile, from its secondary purpose as wrapping a body for burial.

Given by Messrs. Restall, Brown and Clennell.

Excavated by A. Gayet at Sheikh Shata near Damietta, 1898-9 excavation season.

One from a series of four hangings, the other three now in the Metropolitan Museum (object numbers 22.124.3, 22.124.4, 22.124.6).

Linen hanging with tapestry-woven ornament consisting of two pilasters with a head in a medallion above each, and a vertical row of blossoms at wide intervals between. The pilaster on the left is in purple wool, the design being picked out in undyed linen thread; the capital has a pattern of vine-leaves; the shaft and stepped base are covered with interlacings. The pilaster on the right is in bright-coloured wools and linen thread; the capital has a pattern of foliations; the shaft is covered with interlaced bands in polychrome, and the base is in the form of an inverted capital with foliated and geometrical ornament.
This important specimen of the art of the tapestry-weaver in Egypt is one of a set of four hangings discovered in the winter of 1898-9 in a burying-ground at Shaikh Shata, in Lower Egypt.

T.232-1917