Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What is the oldest surviving example of textile cloth?
The earliest known surviving textiles are samples of fiberwork found in Guitarrero Cave, Peru dating back to 8000 BCE. Early fiberwork by the Norte Chico civilization consisted of plant fibers that were intertwined and knotted to form baskets and other containers. Surviving examples of finely spun thread and simple cloths indicate that knowledge of spinning and weaving had already been well-established and developed in the area.
Sewing needles have been dated to at least 50,000 years ago (Denisova Cave, Siberia) – and uniquely associated with a human species other than modern humans, i.e. H. Denisova/H. Altai. The oldest possible example is 60,000 years ago, a needlepoint (missing stem and eye) found in Sibudu Cave, South Africa. Other early examples of needles dating from 41,000-15,000 years ago are found in multiple locations, e.g. Slovenia, Russia, China, Spain, and France.
Wealthy Persians amazed guests by cleaning a cloth by exposing it to fire. For example, according to Tabari, one of the curious items belonging to Khosrow II Parviz, the great Sassanian king (r. 531–579), was a napkin () that he cleaned simply by throwing it into fire. Such cloth is believed to have been made of asbestos imported over the Hindu Kush. According to Biruni in his book, "Gems", any cloths made of asbestos (, "āzarshost") were called "shostakeh" (). Some Persians believed the fiber was the fur of an animal, called the "samandar" (), which lived in fire and died when exposed to water, which was where the former belief that the salamander could tolerate fire originated.
Possibly the oldest surviving music from Sussex is the 14th century Robertsbridge Codex which contains six pieces of music. This manuscript contains one of the earliest pieces of music specifically written for the keyboard. The Robertsbridge Codex is also the earliest evidence of two handed, polyphonic organ music and dates from around 1325.
Arguably the first highly mechanised factory was John Lombe's water-powered silk mill at Derby, operational by 1721. Lombe learned silk thread manufacturing by taking a job in Italy and acting as an industrial spy; however, because the Italian silk industry guarded its secrets closely, the state of the industry at that time is unknown. Although Lombe's factory was technically successful, the supply of raw silk from Italy was cut off to eliminate competition. In order to promote manufacturing the Crown paid for models of Lombe's machinery which were exhibited in the Tower of London.
Surrey's most significant source of prosperity in the later Middle Ages was the production of woollen cloth, which emerged during that period as England's main export industry. The county was an early centre of English textile manufacturing, benefiting from the presence of deposits of fuller's earth, the rare mineral composite important in the process of finishing cloth, around Reigate and Nutfield. The industry in Surrey was focused on Guildford, which gave its name to a variety of cloth, "gilforte", which was exported widely across Europe and the Middle East and imitated by manufacturers elsewhere in Europe. However, as the English cloth industry expanded, Surrey was outstripped by other growing regions of production.
Though Surrey was not the scene of serious fighting in the various rebellions and civil wars of the period, armies from Kent heading for London via Southwark passed through what were then the extreme north-eastern fringes of Surrey during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and Cade's Rebellion in 1450, and at various stages of the Wars of the Roses in 1460, 1469 and 1471. The upheaval of 1381 also involved widespread local unrest in Surrey, as was the case all across south-eastern England, and some recruits from Surrey joined the Kentish rebel army.
The oldest collections of church sermons is the "Blickling homilies", found in a 10th-century manuscript.
The oldest known cave paintings are over 40,000 years old (art of the Upper Paleolithic), found in both the Franco-Cantabrian region in western Europe, and in the caves in the district of Maros (Sulawesi, Indonesia). The oldest type of cave paintings are hand stencils and simple geometric shapes; the oldest undisputed examples of figurative cave paintings are somewhat younger, close to 35,000 years old.
A 2018 study claimed an age of 64,000 years for the oldest examples of (non-figurative) cave art in Iberia, which would imply production by Neanderthals rather than modern humans. In November 2018, scientists reported the discovery of the oldest known figurative art painting, over 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old, of an unknown animal, in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saléh on the Indonesian island of Borneo.
The Game of Thrones Tapestry is a hand-woven tapestry which currently stands at 66 m (217 ft) long, which was opened to the public on 21 July 2017 at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Once finished, it will be longer than its inspiration, the Bayeux Tapestry, at 77 m (253 ft). The tapestry tells the entire story of the television show, "Game of Thrones". It consists of six 11 metre long panels of hand-woven fabric, and one 10.5 metre panel. The seven panels depict scenes from each episode of the aired seasons. After season 8 is aired in 2019, the tapestry is planned to grow to reflect that season's six episodes.
Woodblock printing ("diaoban yinshua" 雕版印刷), known as xylography today, was the first method of printing applied to a paper medium. It became widely used throughout East Asia both as a method for printing on textiles and later, under the influence of Buddhism, on paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to about 220. "Ukiyo-e" is the best known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique on paper are covered by the term woodcut (see below), except for the block-books produced mainly in the fifteenth century.
The Old or Grand Bazaar "(Çarshia e Madhe)" in Gjakova is the oldest bazaar in Kosovo, and it served as an Ottoman trading centre and heart of the town economy. It suffered damage during the Kosovo War but has since been renovated. The Hadum Mosque, built in the 16th century, lies by the bazaar, and includes a highly decorated graveyard, where the town notables were buried. Within the mosque complex were the "hamam" which was destroyed in 2008, the "Old library" from 1671, damaged in the Kosovo War, and also a "meytepi" from 1777. The Bazaar is linked to the city centre, just five minutes away via the Islam-Beg Bridge. The bazaar covers an area of about and the length of its main road is 1 km, with about 500 shops situated along it. It is, however, still home to an active mosque, several türbes, and a clocktower.
Asbestos ware is usually classified under comb ceramic ware. From the times of the earliest comb ware (ca. 5000 BC) in Finland, asbestos was mixed with clay as an adhesive. At some point, people started to make use of the characteristics of asbestos: its long fibres allowed large vessels with thin walls, which made them lighter, without compromising durability. Some of the vessels had 6 mm thick walls with a diameter of around 50 cm (Pöljä-style). The ware is divided into the following styles (Finland):
Apart from Anglo-Saxon architecture, which survives entirely in churches, with only a handful of largely unaltered examples, monumental stone sculpture survives in large stone crosses, an equivalent to the high crosses of the Celtic areas of Britain. Most sculpture was probably once painted, clarifying the designs, which are mostly in relatively low relief and not finished with great precision, and now almost all badly worn and weathered. Dating is usually difficult. Sculpture in wood was very likely more common, but almost the only significant large survival is St Cuthbert's coffin in Durham Cathedral, probably made in 698, with numerous linear images carved or incised in a technique that is a sort of large-scale engraving. The material of the earliest recorded crosses is unknown, but may well have been wood. From various references (to its destruction by Christians) there would seem to have been a tradition of Anglo-Saxon pagan monumental sculpture, probably in wood, of which no examples remain (as opposed to later Anglo-Scandinavian pagan imagery), and with which the crosses initially competed.
In addition to the well-known mummies of ancient Egypt, deliberate mummification was a feature of several ancient cultures in areas of America and Asia with very dry climates. The Spirit Cave mummies of Fallon, Nevada in North America were accurately dated at more than 9,400 years old. Before this discovery, the oldest known deliberate mummy was a child, one of the Chinchorro mummies found in the Camarones Valley, Chile, which dates around 5050 BC. The oldest known naturally mummified human corpse is a severed head dated as 6,000 years old, found in 1936 AD at the site named Inca Cueva No. 4 in South America.
The prehistory of the area that is now the Netherlands was largely shaped by the sea and the rivers that constantly shifted the low-lying geography. The oldest human (Neanderthal) traces were found in higher soils, near Maastricht, from what is believed to be about 250,000 years ago. At the end of the Ice Age, the nomadic late Upper Paleolithic Hamburg culture (c. 13.000–10.000 BC) hunted reindeer in the area, using spears, but the later Ahrensburg culture (c. 11.200–9500 BC) used bow and arrow. From Mesolithic Maglemosian-like tribes (c. 8000 BC) the oldest canoe in the world was found in Drenthe.
When Wallace Carothers arrived at DuPont in 1928 one of the tasks his group took on was the development of new synthetic fibers for textiles. At that time a number of natural polymers such as latex and cellulose were in common use, rayon as a semisynthetic from nitrated cellulose had recently been improved and begun upending the textile industries, and some fully synthetic polymers such as bakelite were also known and being used for certain applications, but the existing fully synthetic polymers could not be drawn into fibers and spun into thread, so great opportunity existed to manufacture thread and yarn from synthetic polymers to join or replace the existing fibers in the market (natural fibers such as cotton, wool, linen, and silk and artificial fiber in the various recently emerged types of rayon).
The Chinchorro mummies are mummified remains of individuals from the South American Chinchorro culture, found in what is now northern Chile. They are the oldest examples of artificially mummified human remains, having been buried up to two thousand years before the Egyptian mummies. While the earliest mummy that has been found in Egypt dated around 3000 BC, the oldest anthropogenically modified Chinchorro mummy dates from around 5050 BC.
Naturally occurring glass, especially the volcanic glass obsidian, has been used by many Stone Age societies across the globe for the production of sharp cutting tools and, due to its limited source areas, was extensively traded. But in general, archaeological evidence suggests that the first true glass was made in coastal north Syria, Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt. Because of Egypt's favorable environment for preservation, the majority of well-studied early glass is found there, although some of this is likely to have been imported. The earliest known glass objects, of the mid-third millennium BC, were beads, perhaps initially created as accidental by-products of metal-working (slags) or during the production of faience, a pre-glass vitreous material made by a process similar to glazing.
In 1884 Hilaire de Chardonnet started the first artificial fiber plant based on regenerated cellulose, or viscose rayon, as a substitute for silk, but it was very flammable. In 1907 Leo Baekeland invented the first synthetic polymer, a thermosetting phenol-formaldehyde resin called Bakelite. Around the same time, Hermann Leuchs reported the synthesis of amino acid N-carboxyanhydrides and their high molecular weight products upon reaction with nucleophiles, but stopped short of referring to these as polymers, possibly due to the strong views espoused by Emil Fischer, his direct supervisor, denying the possibility of any covalent molecule exceeding 6,000 daltons. Cellophane was invented in 1908 by Jocques Brandenberger who treated sheets of viscose rayon with acid.
Much surviving prehistoric art is small portable sculptures. It includes the oldest known representation of the human body, the Venus of Hohle Fel, dating from 40,000-35,000 BC, found in Schelklingen, Germany. It is part of a small group of female Venus figurines found in Central Europe. The Löwenmensch figurine, from about 30,000 BC, is the oldest undisputed piece of figurative art. The Swimming Reindeer of about 11,000 BCE is among the finest Magdalenian carvings in bone or antler of animals in the art of the Upper Paleolithic. At the beginning of the Mesolithic in Europe figurative sculpture greatly reduced, and remained a less common element in art than relief decoration of practical objects until the Roman period, despite some works such as the Gundestrup cauldron from the European Iron Age and the Bronze Age Trundholm sun chariot.
Built in 1856, PS "Skibladner" is the oldest steamship still in operation, serving towns along lake Mjøsa in Norway.
A wide variety of portable objects from various decorative arts were imported from the Islamic world into Europe during the Middle Ages, mostly through Italy, and above all Venice. In many areas European-made goods could not match the quality of Islamic or Byzantine work until near the end of the Middle Ages. Luxury textiles were widely used for clothing and hangings and also, fortunately for art history, also often as shrouds for the burials of important figures, which is how most surviving examples were preserved. In this area Byzantine silk was influenced by Sassanian textiles, and Islamic silk by both, so that is hard to say which culture's textiles had the greatest influence on the Cloth of St Gereon, a large tapestry which is the earliest and most important European imitation of Eastern work. European, especially Italian, cloth gradually caught up with the quality of Eastern imports, and adopted many elements of their designs.
Early 20th Century ethnographer Emil Torday acquired the oldest group of extant textiles from the Kuba tradition from the reigning king, Kot aPe. He called these textiles "Bambala" after the ruling clan. According to Joseph Cornet, these cloths were embroidered by Bushong women who were pregnant with the King's heirs for use in rituals surrounding the birth of the children. They were also used as funerary regalia for noble women. The slight sculptural relief, elaborate geometric designs and technical cohesiveness of the textiles indicate that they were created by highly skilled elders. According to art historian Vanessa Drake Moraga, "That Kuba embroiderers represented textile structures in their compositions underscores both the value of weaving to the culture and the prestige attached to women art."
The first actual textile, as opposed to skins sewn together, was probably felt. Surviving examples of Nålebinding, another early textile method, date from 6500 BC. Our knowledge of ancient textiles and clothing has expanded in the recent past thanks to modern technological developments. Our knowledge of cultures varies greatly with the climatic conditions to which archeological deposits are exposed; the Middle East and the arid fringes of China have provided many very early samples in good condition, but the early development of textiles in the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa and other moist parts of the world remains unclear. In northern Eurasia, peat bogs can also preserve textiles very well.
The first known textile of South America was discovered in Guitarrero Cave in Peru, it was woven out of vegetable fibers and dates back to 8,000 B.C.E.
No examples of pre Conquest feather fabric survive, and only a few survive from the colonial period. Important cloths of this type include two mantles from San Miguel Zinacantepec, the Huipil of La Malinche at the Museum of Anthropology, the Tlamachayatl at the Ethnographic and Historical Museum in Rome and the Paño Novohispano at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. All have feathers or feather pieces either embroidered onto or twisted into cotton. The Paño is a remnant of a huipil with feathers woven into the cloth, and is of a very similar design to the Malinche huipil.