The EgYarn project has focused on the textile production of New Kingdom Egypt (1550-1070 BCE). The main objective of the project was to provide a fresh perspective on New Kingdom social and economic organisation, by analysing the production of textiles. The project combined archaeological findings (textile tools, fabrics, fishing nets), textual sources (papyri, ostraca and temple inscriptions), iconography and experimental archaeology, to answer important questions such as: where and how were textiles produced? Can domestic and institutional production be differentiated? Did the consumption of home-produced textiles extend beyond the family sphere? Decoding the New Kingdom's textile industry provides insight into a fundamental aspect of the Ancient Egyptian economy at its peak.
The project has produced significant results through the activities carried out in the three Work Packages. The first part focused on the technical study of archaeological items, to understand the chaîne opératoire of Egyptian textiles. A series of methodologies and tools have been created for the study of Egyptian textiles.
The analysis of a selection of wooden tools (with wood identification) and of fibres and textiles in different stages of the process has allowed to design the experimental archaeology session. This has been designed and carried out between Denmark and Sweden and subsequently replicated in Italy to validate the results. The experiment included the processing of flax fibres with different methods, in particular one called decortification; splicing the fibres for creating roves; twisting and plying the roves with different spindles and using the spinning techniques attested in Egyptian iconography. The result has been the development of a methodology for replicating ancient yarns, using decortication and splicing, which significantly reduces the amount of water required for fibre preparation and produces fewer pollutants. Finally, woods used in textile production have been identified with highly promising results in terms of wood sourcing and economic possibilities of the ancient community.
The combined approach of using textual source together with archaeological findings proved to be very useful. The analysis of textual sources, in fact, showed an interesting picture of the organisation of the textile production in the New Kingdom. It has been particularly interesting to check the terminology used, as my expertise in textile analysis allowed me to find problems in the translations and create a more specific terminology of Ancient Egyptian textile industry. Furthermore, comparing the archaeological findings with the textual reference provided a much more completed picture of the organisation of the production, which would have not been possible only by using one or another resource. It is now clear that the production was not simply a dichotomy of household production and palace/temple production, but there were other categories in between (household production advanced and cottage industry) and even evidence of a mass production ante-litteram. It also opened the way to further investigation on the terminology used for the different types of textiles, as the access to archaeological objects allowed me to start the creation of a typology of garments.
