I contributed Case study 8, and a bit for the catalog, on the fringed nalbound sock in their collection. The sock is one of 112 textile fragments from Roman, Byzantine, and Early Medieval Arab Egypt currently in the National Museum of Denmark. The case study includes some beautiful professional photographs of the sock!
This is the same sock I was honored to examine in 2019. Initial results of that examination were included in“Fringed and patterned: decorative elements in Romano-Coptic nalbound socks” presented at the Textiles from the Nile Valley study group conference on the 27th of October 2019. More in depth information and the current status of my research on this sock was presented in “A fringe study in footwear: lessons learned from a sock in a box” at the Reconstructing Textiles and Their History: Egyptian Fabrics from the 1st Millennium AD online workshop that occurred on March 26th, 2022.
The exhibition has twelve downloadable PDFs that include the Introduction, a Catalog of 30 fabrics from the collection, and eight Case Studies that go deeper into a variety of topics.
The online exhibition is the result of the RECONTEXT research project entitled “Reconstructing the history of Egyptian textiles from the 1st Millennium AD at the National Museum of Denmark” which involved research carried out by historians, art historians, archaeologists and ancient fabric conservators. The project included analyses of textile fibers, weaving and looping techniques, as well as complete photography of the entire collection. Fingers crossed that we will be able to continue research on this collection.
I’m really looking forward to being able to share this with you all. After some delays, the online exhibition that I referenced in my post on the Reconstructing Textiles and their history workshop last May is happening.
On Wednesday, 15 March 2023, from 15:15-16:00 Copenhagen time (10:15-11:00 am EDT), the Centre for Textile Research will be hosting their bi-weekly lecture in person and on Zoom. This week’s is the pre-opening of the “Archaeological puzzles in a museum” online exhibition, presented by Dr. Maria Joanna Mossakowska, that will be opening at the National Museum of Denmark end of this month. For three minutes near the end, I will be presenting on my case study of the fringed nalbound sock in their collection.
The exhibition will be covering the systematic research done within the RECONTEXT research project entitled “Reconstructing the history of Egyptian textiles from the 1st Millennium AD at the National Museum of Denmark” on the 112 textile fragments from Roman, Byzantine, and Early Medieval Arab Egypt in the NMD, comprising the richest ensemble in Denmark.
Per the linked announcement above “RECONTEXT involved research carried out by historians, art historians, archaeologists and ancient fabric conservators. The project also included analyses of textile fibers and weaving techniques, as well as professional photographic documentation of the entire collection. The results of these investigations are presented in the exhibition entitled Archeaological Puzzles in a Museum / Arkæologiske puslespil på et museum, which will be available for the public in March 2023 on the NMD website (https://natmus.dk/). The exhibition includes general information on what a collection of Egyptian textiles is, how it is created, and the methods of reconstructing its history and the objects that form it. It presents 30 selected fabrics, arranged according to the four stages of the collection’s history. For the visitor who wishes to go deeper into various topics, eight Case studies were prepared.”
Case Study 8 is on the fringed brown sock in the NMD collection. This is the same sock I was honored to examine in 2019 and presented the current status of my research on in “A fringe study in footwear: lessons learned from a sock in a box” at the Reconstructing Textiles and Their History: Egyptian Fabrics from the 1st Millennium AD online workshop that occurred on March 26th, 2022.
Lily helped keep me company during the presentation. It was announced that the online exhibition should be available for viewing by the 1st of April!
Festive Koteka from Papua New Guinea on display in The Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland. Photo taken by Anne Marie Decker August 30, 2022.
Traditional forms of nalbinding are used for a wide variety of purposes around the world. One area with a strong continuous tradition of nalbinding is the highlands of Papua New Guinea and West Papua, Indonesia. While one is most likely to be familiar with the Bilums from the region, another usage of nalbinding is found covering some Koteka.
A Koteka is a traditional penis sheath worn by some ethnic groups of Papua; mainly in the highlands. One may also see the koteka referred to as a horim. While often made of a particular gourd, the ones of most interest to this blog are the ones that have an outer layer of nalbound textile.
I have not yet had the opportunity to travel to Papua to see the amazing amount and variety of nalbinding that their traditions have and continue to produce. I do hope to make it to their annual Bilum Festival and Gala someday. And yet, Papuan nalbinding has been collected by colonizers and purchased by modern tourists for centuries and thus found its way into some of the most unexpected places. So much so, that when I once again find nalbinding where I didn’t expect it, I’m not surprised to often find that the example in question is Papuan.
On my most recent trip to Iceland, where I was honored to be able to examine the mitten from Arneiðarstaðir in Iceland, I also took the opportunity to go to several other museums. I picked up a new nalbinding needle at the Saga Museum. But having entirely forgotten about nalbound koteka covers, I was rather pleased and surprised to find nalbinding in The Icelandic Phallological Museum. Probably the last place I expected to find nalbinding. Even more so than finding nalbinding in a Ripley’s Believe it or Not.
The Festive Koteka in The Icelandic Phallological Museum uses both the Simple Looping variant (often called Blanket or Buttonhole Stitch) and a spaced and staggered Cross-Knit Looping variant. The Danai tribe Koteka shown in the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! video has the Simple Looping variant on the sheath itself and what looks like a compound variant (undetermined) in the strap.
I’m honored to be included in the Reconstructing Textiles and Their History: Egyptian Fabrics from the 1st Millennium AD online workshop coming up on Saturday March 26th, 2022. I will be presenting “A fringe study in footwear: lessons learned from a sock in a box” on the current status of my research into the fringed brown nalbound sock* in the National Museum of Denmark at 7am Eastern Daylight Time (noon Copenhagen time) .
The online workshop will include research on a good number of the fabrics in the Egyptian collection of the National Museum of Denmark as well as on objects from other collections directly related to the fabrics in Copenhagen. It looks like a very interesting program! These presentations are expected to be published in the “catalog” (PDF format) of the online exhibition on history of the Copenhagen collection available in May 2022 on the National Museum of Denmark’s website.
If you’d like to join us, the online workshop is open to the public. However, you will need to register by 24 March in order to get the Zoom link. With her permission, I’ve set up a Google form to collect email addresses to send to Dr. Mossakowska-Gaubert for registration here: https://forms.gle/jpkyxomMvVuVQSDAA
For a PDF version of the program, click the download button.
This workshop and the subsequent online exhibition are organized in the framework of the project RECONTEXT: Reconstructing the history of Egyptian textiles from the 1st Millennium AD at the National Museum of Denmark. You can read more about this year long project at: https://ctr.hum.ku.dk/research-programmes-and-projects/recontext-reconstructing-the-history-of-egyptian-textiles-from-the-1st-millennium-ad–at-the-national-museum-of-denmark/ The stated aim of the project “is to establish a history of the Egyptian textiles collection at the National Museum of Denmark: reconstructing the way the objects are acquired, their provenance, as well as their original look and shape.” As per the CTR’s website: “RECONTEXT is funded by two Danish foundations: Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond and Beckett-Fonden, and hosted by the Centre for Textile Research (CTR) – Saxo Institute: University of Copenhagen. It is conducted in close collaboration with the National Museum of Denmark.”
I was honored to be able to present “But it looks like… methods for differentiating non-woven looped structures” at this year’s North European Symposium for Archeological Textiles (NESAT) conference. There were soo many very interesting papers, posters, and excellent discussions. I posted the abstract a few weeks ago, but I’m pleased to announce that my recording of the presentation is now uploaded and available for viewing on YouTube: https://youtu.be/pNqq2Z7vwgQ. Additional supplementary content, including short demonstration videos and other structural details, is available on my “But it looks like…” page at: https://nalbound.com/but-it-looks-like
But it looks like… methods for differentiating non-woven looped structures as presented at NESAT XIV on August 25th, 2021.
NESAT XIV was originally planned for May of 2020 in Oulu, Finland. Restrictions on travel due to COVID-19 led to delays, but we were finally able to hold the conference online via Zoom the week of August 23rd-26th, 2021. The presentations were pre-recorded and the scheduled sessions allowed for some excellent discussions. We got to learn about many amazing textiles and some very fascinating advances in textile science. A few of the videos are being made public and links to them are located here: https://www.nesatxiv.org/public-videos
The Textile Museum is working to put images of its collection online. Luckily that now includes multiple Islamic Era Egyptian socks. Beautiful photos of the blue and white cotton knitted socks and several compound nalbound socks.
The pilot site does not yet have their complete textile collection, but it does have several stunning examples of blue and white stranded knitting (interlooping) and four nalbound (interconnected looping) socks to add to the list of the Egyptian corpus. There is also one slip-stitch crochet sock that is going to require additional investigation into its provenance.* The catalog data is not necessarily up to date, which is not surprising given the volume and speed with which they are entering the records. They also have several Andean artifacts of interest as well.
Note: The pilot site doesn’t seem to react well to Facebook. So if you are viewing it there, you may get the same sock repeated. Try viewing it via WordPress or a different browser.
Last January, I headed to Europe to present my preliminary research into Romano-Coptic nalbinding from Egypt and surrounding regions. As I generally don’t often get the opportunity to visit Europe, I had arranged several appointments with various institutions to see nalbound objects in their collections. One of these was with the Warrington Museum & Art Gallery.
I had attempted to reach out to the Warrington before I left, but as the timing had been short, I had not been able to make contact. So after my appointment at the Whitworth Art Gallery to view their collection, my mother and I met up with Regina De’Giovanni and, after a quick lunch, we made our way to Warrington to see if by chance the sock I had heard of was actually on display. The Warrington is a lovely museum. If you ever get the chance to go, I highly recommend it.
The poster by the entrance after we climbed the stairs as the elevator was out that day.
The Warrington Museum & Art Gallery is in the original Warrington Museum and Library building.
The mummy room with cabinets filled with interesting artifacts.
One of the Naturalist rooms.
A cabinet of Egyptian finds.
I seem to always take pictures of the cat mummies.
Local Roman Era finds.
Local Medieval and Tudor Era finds.
A display on natural dyes.
Local plant life.
A hat from Peru.
Australian Dilly Bag.
The Warrington Museum and Art Gallery is an eclectic mix of 19th century Naturalist to Modern Art Gallery. My favorite areas were in the anthropological and archaeological sections. While I went to see their Egyptian sock, I also got to see several nalbound items on display from Peru and Australia.
Thorough examination of the Egyptian displays did not reveal a sock hiding anywhere. But, as they are rather crowded displays, we decided to ask. The lovely young lady on duty said that there was no sock on display. However, if we were interested in seeing it, she had a form we could fill out and she would get it to the collections manager to see if a visit could be arranged. She was surprised that I had the inventory number on me. Given that I would be leaving Manchester in just a few days, we did not expect there was any chance I’d get to see it.
And yet, before we had even finished viewing the rest of the collections, Craig Sherwood found us. He knew exactly the sock I was asking about. It was in a box with some of their other Coptic textiles. He was going to the store rooms the next day and could bring it to the Museum the day after that. Would I be available in two days time? Would I? Luckily our flight out of Manchester was not until Wednesday evening and we had no specific plans for that morning.
It was rainy on that Wednesday and we missed the best train. After finding a place to set up (all the exam rooms were full), we proceeded to have a lovely time discussing Coptic socks and examining the precious little example in their collection. As this sock had not previously had a photograph published, I had very little information about it beforehand. I got to learn what its current condition was, the fineness of the yarn used, and which foot it was for. It had clearly been worn and the dust of Egypt was still on it.
I would like to extend my warmest thanks and appreciation to Craig Sherwood and the other employees of the Warrington Museum & Art Gallery for their assistance and gracious hospitality giving me the opportunity to examine this beautiful blue sock in their collection.
I was honored to be granted permission to include a photograph of the sock in my presentation (shown on the 5th slide), Charting the Nalbinding of the Nile, to help round out a visual summary of the variety of nalbound socks from Egypt and the surrounding regions.
Once I got back from Copenhagen and Nantes, it was time to quick turn around and prepare for the presentation at the Textiles from the Nile Valley study group’s conference and associated travel. Unfortunately, this left me little time to work on the blog. That said, I have been gathering lots of interesting information that I will be processing and hoping to share in this and other appropriate venues.
Note: This was a long and involved trip. This is a summary, but it is still quite long. I will be making more detailed posts as to the specific appointments/items as time permits.
There was only a month and a half between the two trips, so I had to immediately start arranging my travel plans and requesting permissions from museums to use photographs of items in their collections in my presentation. Complicating that, is requesting, arranging, and confirming research examination appointments along the way. As luck would have it, almost all of the institutions I approached were able to accommodate my schedule, so this became a very packed trip.
The chicken in the gift shop spoke to me, but there was no room in the luggage. Photo credit: Ruth Decker
We started off by heading to Nashville, Tennessee. An online friend of mine was being honored and I had been asked to participate in the ceremony. Mom and I had a lovely time exploring Nashville. We went to the Tennessee State Museum. An evening at the Grand Ole Opry (very fun) and some tire pressure trouble (not so fun) with the rental car topped off the evening before we drove out to our hotel near the site.
A slow morning, one of the few this trip, got us to site just before 2pm. We then proceeded to try to not be noticeable as it was supposed to be a surprise. It worked well and I got to spend a lovely evening chatting nalbinding with Muirghein. The temperature drops rapidly when the sun goes down in the Tennessee mountains and we were not prepared. By the time the ceremony actually occurred, I could barely speak I was soo cold. Thankfully, due to the hospitality of the locals, I was not actually frozen. Nonetheless, the heat and water pressure of the shower was greatly appreciated once we got to the hotel.
Our friendly inspector, Mr. Clyde. Photo credit: Ruth Decker
The next morning involved repacking for Europe. An hours drive to the airport and a quick flight up to Newark brought us to where we were met by my heroic husband. His visit solved several of our issues; how to not take extra luggage to Europe we weren’t going to use there and collecting a few forgotten items. It also solved how to get to JFK for the next flight. A quick dinner and we were off. Except for a minor issue regarding overweight luggage, everything went smoothly at the airport and we landed in London on Monday the 14th. After which we followed our host’s excellent directions to her house, where we were greeted, and inspected, by a beautiful and friendly cat named Clyde.
Tuesday was filled with appointments at the Blythe House. The first was with the V&A’s Clothworkers’ Centre. My sincerest thanks to Benjamin Hinson for his excellent support during our visit. The lighting was challenging, especially with two of the items in melamine envelopes. However, I did get the chance to see details that I had not previously seen of the purple sock with lacing loops (link), the red and yellow striped children’s sock (link) with its mix of cross-knit and pierced loop variations, the brown sock with many patches (link), the toe cap once thought to be a doll cap (link), and the “bag” that looks like a cat toy (link). Unfortunately, but certainly not unexpectedly, they were unable to pull the pair of red socks (link) off display for me to examine. I did manage to capture some details of them on display as we took a quick trip to the V&A at the end of the day.
The display case in which the red socks, 2085&A-1900, appear is in a different location than when I first saw them on display in May of 2014. Photo credit: Ruth Decker
My second appointment was with the British Museum’s Textile Study Room. Here I requested, and got to see, their red Egyptian sock (link), a pair of Omani sand socks (link), and some beautiful Peruvian bird and flower bands (Am1931,1123.21.a is the one I most closely examined). The Collections Manager, Helen Wolfe, was kind enough to have brought out another piece of Peruvian cross-knit looping for me to see as well; a lovely fingered turban band of which glorious photos are published in Textiles from the Andes by Penelope Dransart and Helen Wolfe.
I was very fortunate in the timing of this trip as the Blythe House is closing soon and the V&A’s Clothworkers’ Centre and the Textile Department of the British Museum will be closed for a while as they navigate the move to new locations.
Wednesday we headed to the British Museum to the Ancient Egypt and Sudan Study Room. I spent the morning examining several fragments of knitting: some knitted tubes (link & link) and a lovely bit of multi-colored cotton stranded knitting (link) from Nubia. The afternoon was spend examining the colorful child’s sock (link) that recently had its dyes analyzed by multispectral imaging (link to article), the brown cross-knit sock (link), and the compound nalbound sock with embroidered cross (link) that is so similar to the one I examined in the Museum der Kulturen in Basel this last January (link to our visit, but not that particular sock).
Capturing my own photos of UC16766 at the Petrie Museum. Photo credit: Ruth Decker
At the lunch break we took a quick dash to the Petrie Museum to see the pair of socks they have on display (link). Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain a research appointment as they are booked solid through February which meant I was unable to see their other sock (link). I look forward to the opportunity in the future as there are several places in the UK I still need to see.
Thursday morning it was up early so that we could catch a train to Oxford as I had an 11am appointment with the Pitt Rivers Museum. A quick walk to the storage depot and I got to spend the day examining 5 pairs of Bedu sand socks collected in Oman (2003.9.134 .1, 2003.9.135, 2003.9.136, 2003.9.137). Interesting tidbits include noting that the inside heel of the vibrant red and green striped pair was made using the most glowing orange yarn (2003.9.138) and that the technical front does not appear to have been considered when applying the additional pads. The accompanying paperwork so kindly provided by Nicholas Crowe included the the fact that one of the pairs was made specifically for the collector and thus we know the specific dates of its creation. I was also granted the chance to see the pair of split toe felt socks collected by Petrie (catalog entry link & images link & link).
Friday morning took us to the Ashmolean and The Von Bothmer Centre for the Study of Antiquities; which is currently entered through a fresco in the Pompeii exhibit. Here I met with Liam McNamarra, the Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator for Ancient Egypt and Sudan, to examine the baby bootie and larger brown sock. The brown of the baby bootie is actually purple, so it’s purple with orange and green stripes. The brown sock also revealed a few surprises. Never let anyone tell you they only have a boring brown sock of no consequence. Every single one I have examined has had some special interesting detail to add to our understanding of these objects. Unfortunately, these socks have yet to make it into the Ashmolean’s online catalog as of yet. I did provide a link to one online image in an earlier blog post on January’s visit to the Bolton, New Walk Museum, and Ashmolean (link).
My brother and I at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. We had such fun opening all the drawers.
After my appointment at the Ashmolean, we met up with my brother. Having stashed our luggage we went back to the Pitt Rivers to actually explore the collections on display. The Pitt Rivers has to have my favorite ever directions on how to get to their museum. Once in the Natural History Museum, go past the dinosaurs. When you find Darwin, turn left. There you will find the entrance to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Bring a flashlight and some patience. It is absolutely packed with all kinds of interesting items. The bilums and baskets were of course a favorite, but I was also enamored with the wheat weaving from 1900 and several of the wax votives.
We finished the day with a walk all the way around Christchurch. Unintentional, but we caught the sun setting in the golden hour on a beautiful building covered in red ivy. We attended the Evensong service and then my brother drove us home for a quiet relaxing weekend.
Monday morning it was back to London and the British Museum to meet up with Joanne Dyer for a delightful chat about her work with multispectral imaging for dye analysis as done on the British Museum’s colorful child’s sock and my work on understanding the sock within the context of the broader corpus of Romano-Coptic Egyptian socks. https://twitter.com/JoanneDyer_BM/status/1186351417419796480
Tuesday morning was an early train to Amsterdam. I have never seen so many bicycles in one place. We took a walk down Niuewendyk were we saw what has to be my favorite T-shirt shop (mashing various genres together in a beautiful and cohesive manner). The Dam square was populated with Santa and Darth Vader as well as a beautiful bubble maker and a great swarm of pigeons. While mom and I often don’t use the audio tours, the one offered for the Royal Palace was excellent. The gift shop left me trying to work out how to bring home a full size umbrella. Didn’t manage it this time.
All of a sudden the pigeons took off and swirled through the air. Dam square, Amsterdam.
Wednesday was an appointment with the TropenMuseum. Veerle van Kersen brought these socks brought to my attention very recently and I was lucky enough to have a day free in my travels that could easily bring me to Amsterdam. There was a slight mix up as to what day I would arrive, but Sofie de Weger made time to ensure I had the opportunity to examine them. They are all small children’s socks, but the largest of them has several colors (link). There is also one other complete sock (link) and two toe/heel pieces (link), one of which is very small (link). Not much is known of their provenance as is unfortunately the case for much of the compound nalbound finds.
One of the windmills of Dokkum. Photo credit: Anne Decker
The day ended with a multi-train and final bus leg trip up to the Northern end of the Netherlands to a small town called Dokkum. We arrived just after 9pm, which unfortunately meant that all the kitchens were closed, but the lights were so beautiful. We took an evening stroll around to see the sights. We saw two lovely windmills and met a very friendly cat that hopped up on a post to be petted. It was a perfect evening. The scent and crisp chill of autumn setting in.
Thursday morning we met up with Harma Peining and her husband before heading to the Museum Dokkum to examine their 19th century hat. More will be forthcoming on that in future articles. We had a lovely visit and a chance to explore the museum as well. Harma and her husband graciously gave us a ride to the train station which cut down on some of our travel time and gave us time to catch up on the way.
An unfortunate delay in Rotterdam meant that we got into Antwerp after 10pm. The delay itself was kept pleasant by some lovely Belgians we met on the platform and it is due to them that we had an easy time catching the bus towards our hotel in Antwerp. A bit of a walk and we arrived. Such a relief to know I didn’t have to pack up again for three days.
Friday morning I sent mom off to explore Antwerp while I finished up my slides for the presentation. The last of the permissions I needed had come in on Thursday and thus it was easier than it could have been. However, getting all the last minute minutia arranged took me through until the afternoon. I finished up just as my friend, Cary Karp, arrived. After giving him a few moments to freshen up, we were out the door to the Katoen Natie headquArters so that I could examine the beautiful pair of children’s socks in The Pheobus Foundation‘s collection. I got a good look at a particular detail I had been confused by in previously published images of the pair. While we were there, Kristin Van Passel, asked us if we’d be interested in examining some knitted tube fragments that are also in their collection. We were able to take a very close look at their structure which was aided by the multicolored patterning of the tubes. When we finished up it was time to join in the conference’s social gathering upstairs. A chance to meet up with old friends (a few) and new (many).
Saturday was spent enjoying the excellent presentations being delivered at the Textiles from the Nile Valley Study Group’s conference dedicated to “Explorers, first collectors and traders of textiles from Egypt of the 1st millennium AD.” Putting names to faces in some cases. The study group does not maintain a website, but the program was uploaded on the Universität Bonn’s website (link). The book table was also fun to peruse and caused some difficulty in how to get them all home. You will notice several new entries to the Annotated bibliography page.
Saturday evening was an optional dinner gathering with conference attendees at a lovely, but loud, restaurant near the water. I got to try more new foods. During the lull between courses, I was able to finish up my theoretical re-construction of what the Dura Europos patterned fragment might have looked like as a complete sock, based on my examinations of other contemporaneous finds. This is the piece Lily had been helping me with earlier in the month.
My evening ended with a quick lesson in how to steam block a sock using a steam iron and hotel towels. After basting in a rough outline of the fragment edges, it was ready for its photograph and insertion into my slides for the morning’s presentation. My presentation, Fringed and patterned: decorative elements in Romano-Coptic nalbound socks, was first thing on the schedule Sunday morning.
Sunday morning before my presentation. Photo credit: Ruth Decker
The submitted abstract reads: “Approximately ten percent of the recognized corpus of Roman-Coptic nalbinding consists of items with fringe or stitch patterning as decorative elements. This paper will report on the results of a preliminary structural analysis of a number of such objects and place them in a broader museological context. These are three pairs of socks found in Gebel Abou Fedah by F. Cailliaud (1787-1869) now in the Musée Dobrée in Nantes, France and the single sock recently rediscovered in the National Museum of Denmark in an older unexamined lot. These socks will be compared with similar contemporaneous items such as: the image of a sock collected by T. Graf (1840-1903) of currently unknown location, the fragment collected by F.W. Kelsey (1858-1927) now in the Kelsey Museum of Archeology in Ann Arbor, the sock collected by C.T. Currelly (1876-1957) now in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the fragments from Dura-Europos.”
My investigations turned up several more comparables after submitting the abstract, so there were also examples from the collections of The Whitworth Art Gallery (University of Manchester), the Bolton Museum and Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, and the musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs. All of whom were gracious enough to grant me permissions to use images of their collections in my presentation.
Once the Sunday presentations were completed, many of us boarded a bus to Brussels to visit the “Crossroads – Traveling through Middle Ages” exhibit at the Art and History Museum (once known as the Cinquantenaire Museum). I enjoyed learning more about their collections, but my attention was, not surprisingly, held most by the child’s sock (and tunic) on display (link). The exhibit is ongoing through the end of March next year (2020) in case you happen to be in Brussels.
We left Brussels that evening heading up to Leiden in the Netherlands. Another delay in Rotterdam (brake trouble on our train) meant we took a detour past Delft through The Hauge, but as it was already dark we did not get to see much. The morning light in Leiden, on the other hand, was perfect. We decided to forgo finding a bus and took a walk instead to meet up with Diana Lankhof at the Textile Research Centre. Lies van de Wege, the depot manager, was kind enough to open the Centre an hour early as we had limited time before we had to leave to catch the plane home from Amsterdam. I had a lovely time chatting with Diana and Lies over tea and getting the chance to explore TRC’s “Socks & Stockings” exhibit which runs through the 19th of December.
Unfortunately, the time to leave drew quickly nigh and we had to catch our train to Amsterdam to begin the trip home. Schiphol Airport made the process easy and we were soon on our way to New York where my dear husband awaited to drive us the rest of the way home.
This has been a very busy year. While there are still objects out there that I would dearly love to have the opportunity to see, and I am set to present a poster at NESAT next year (schedule), I also need time to write up my reports on all of the items I have been honored to see this year.
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***Jan. 10, 2022 – Updated links to the online catalog record for the socks in the Petrie Museum as they have recently updated their database and changed URLs.***
Last seen in Egypt during the 1913-14 excavations of Antinoë, the other three socks pictured appear to have made their way to various English institutions. However, where is the 4th?
Reproduced with permission of Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/ Modified from the original by the addition of numbers and the red box.
The original image was taken by John de Monins Johnson during the 1913-14 excavation of Antinoë for the Graeco-Roman branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The glass negative of which is now housed in the Griffith Institute. Their online catalog, http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/johnson/jo10-13.html, shows the image rotated 180 degrees with the missing sock at the bottom. An excellent overview of Johnson’s role in documenting the excavations, is available here in Elisabeth O’Connell’s article “John de Monins Johnson’s 1913/14 Egypt Exploration Fund expedition to Antinoupolis (Antinoë).” Fig. 104 shows the socks, but there are also many images of other items excavated at that time as well as information regarding several other socks and nalbound fragments distributed by the EEF in 1914-15.
Note: At the time of the excavations, the socks were presumed to be knitted as the differences between the crossed knitting and cross-knit nalbinding techniques had not yet been described.
This last year has been a very exciting one as I work to track down all known examples of nalbinding (simple and compound) found in Egypt and surrounding regions. (Preliminary results were presented in January.) Primarily these have been dated art historically to the Coptic Era with some earlier and some later dates, generally covering much of the 1st millennium. Radio carbon dating has tended to bring the dating of these finds earlier than the art historical datings, moving many of them into the Roman and Late Antiquity Eras.
Many of these finds I have known of for decades and thus am simply collating and analyzing data I have already collected. But as I am searching for more recently published data and images, I have had the repeated giddy fortune to run across finds I did not know about previously. Sometimes they are old finds that have been hiding in their museums for over a century or obscure publications that are now finally easier to track down (a shout out to my friends that send me articles; you know who you are). Occasionally, the finds are from relatively recent (within the last 30 years or so) excavations. Sometimes it is simply an image that I then have to track down where it is currently located and if there are any publications. Other times it is a reference in a publication leaving me to track down images to assist with my comparative analysis.
Today, it is an image (embedded below). Conveniently posted within a nice article that provides information regarding the institutions involved with the excavation. Most importantly, it notes that while the “Child’s Sock” was found amongst rubble, the stratigraphy led to well-dated layers resulting in a dating from the Greco-Roman Period of 2nd century BCE. Thus leading to the added excitement of potentially corroborating the carbon dating of another cross-knit nalbound sock that fell unexpectedly into the first few centuries before the Common Era.
So if you heard a random giddy squeal of joy today, it might have been me. A new to me sock, complete with image and dating. A new city for the map of finds. Potential corroboration of the dating of another sock. These are the things that make me bounce with glee. Now to actually dig further and find more information.
De Moor, Antoine, Cäcilia Fluck, M. Van Strydonck, and M. Boudin. “Radiocarbon dating of Late Roman woolen socks from Egypt,” In Textiles, tools and techniques of the 1st millennium AD from Egypt and neighbouring countries. Proceedings of the 8th conference of the research group ‘Textiles from the Nile Valley,’ Antwerp, 4-6 October 2013, edited by Antoine De Moor, Cäcilia Fluck, and Petra Linscheid, p. 131-136. Tielt: Lannoo Publishers, 2015.
