664 



DAMASK 



DAM ASUS 



precious stones ; arabesque ceilings set with 

 Venetian mirrors, and adorned with blue and 

 purple and gold all that oriental art and lavish 

 expenditure can do has been done to attract and 

 charm the eye. 



Great and steady progress is being made in 

 Damascus in education, especially by the Christians ; 

 but the Jews and Mohammedans are also awaking 

 to the necessity of a higher standard of civilisation. 

 For many years the Irish Presbyterians have con- 

 ducted successful educational establishments in the 

 city and neighbouring villages as auxiliary to their 

 mission work. The British Syrian schools have 

 also an establishment, and the London Jews' 

 Society. 



One of the sights of Damascus is the Hajj (q.v.). 

 When it is starting for Mecca the whole city turns 

 out to see the procession. For miles around there 

 is a surging sea of human beings, dressed in the 

 brightest and most striking colours. Circassians 

 and Afghans, Kurds and Kalmucks, Turkomans and 

 Tekkes, Bedouins from the desert, and shepherds 

 from the steppes, and all the heterogeneous tribes 

 and peoples of the East, are represented in that 

 brilliant procession. Damascus is also one of the 

 meeting-places between the East and West. 

 Enormous caravans of camels pass to and fro 

 between Bagdad and Damascus, exchanging the 

 dates and tobacco and spices and carpets of the 

 East for the produce of the looms and workshops 

 of Europe. The chief exports are grain, flour, 

 native cotton and silk manufactures, wool, apricot 

 paste and stones, raisins, and liquorice-root ; the 

 imports include textiles, indigo, tobacco, coffee, 

 sugar, and leather. The exports have an annual 

 value of 350,000, and the imports of about 

 400,000, half of tlie latter British. In 1889 gas 

 and tramways were introduced into the city ; and 

 since 1892 two railways hither (from Haifa and from 

 Beyrout) were begun, but not finished. Pop. about 

 150,000, of whom 20,000 are Christians of various 

 sects ; 6000 are Jews. 



Damask. This name, long given to certain 

 fabrics with ornamental patterns, appears to have 

 originated through Damascus having become, as 

 early as the 12th century, so celebrated for its 

 figured silks that they were sought for everywhere. 

 The term damask is now applied to stuffs made for 

 table-covers, window curtains, and furniture cover- 

 ings, with floral, scroll, heraldic, or partly geo- 

 metrical patterns woven in the loom, but not to 

 printed designs. There are silk, woollen, linen, 

 and cotton damasks. Some are of two materials, 

 usually dyed of different colours, such as silk and 

 linen, or silk and wool, while many old damasks 

 are of silk and gold. There are other figured 

 textiles more or less resembling damask, such as 

 Brocade ( q.v. ) and figured Velvet ( q.v. ), but on these 

 the pattern is generally, at least slightly, raised, 

 while in damask the surface is flat, and the pattern is 

 distinct on both sides of the cloth. The structure of 

 damask, like diaper, is merely a variety of twilling. 

 It is by the order .n which the warp threads are 

 raised and depressed for the interweaving with the 

 weft that the pattern is produced ; the weft, as a 

 rule, intersecting the warp from every fourth up to 

 every eighth thread. This is accomplished by a 

 Jacquard apparatus attached to the loom. The 

 pattern is first painted on a specially prepared 

 paper, and then 'read off' and perforated on cards 

 by a cutting machine made for the purpose, each 

 card being made to control the arrangement for 

 one shot or weft thread. These cards, which may 

 be from 200 to 2000 in number, are laced into 

 an endless chain, and made to revolve on a 

 cylinder forming part of the apparatus. The 

 holes in the cards correspond to a certain number of 

 cross ' needles,' into which are looped upright wires 



terminating in hooks for lifting the warp threads. 

 The mechanism for raising such of these wires, and 

 with them the warp threads as are required for 

 each throw of the shuttle, is explained under 

 JACQUARD-LOOM. It requires four Jacquard- 

 machines to complete some patterns of damask, 

 and a greater number if the design is exceptionally 

 elaborate. 



Table-linen damask is perhaps the kind most 

 largely made. In Great Britain, the principal seats 

 of this manufacture are Dunfermline in Scotland, 

 Belfast in Ireland, and Barnsley in Yorkshire. At 

 some of the linen damask mills in England and 

 Scotland, coloured union damask, of wool and linen, 

 is also made on a large scale. Cotton damasks, 

 both dyed and undyed, are woven extensively at 

 Manchester and its neighbourhood, as Avell as at 

 Glasgow and Paisley. The mills where all-wool 

 damasks are chiefly manufactured are situated 

 at or near Halifax and Bradford, where a new 

 kind, consisting of mohair, or of mohair and silk, 

 has been recently fabricated. Silk damasks are 

 principally made in the neighbourhood of London. 

 Since 1860, largely through the labours of Dr 

 Bock of Aix-la-Chapelle, one or two very interest- 

 ing collections of Eiiropean damasks and other 

 figured stuffs, ranging in date from the 13th to 

 the 16th century, have been made. A catalogue 

 with some illustrations of the specimens in the 

 South Kensington Museum was prepared some 

 years ago by the Rev. Dr Daniel Rock. Since 

 then some remarkable examples have been added, 

 and the authorities of that institution are now 

 publishing large coloured illustrations of these. 

 The original pieces, even though many of them are 

 much faded, give a vivid idea of the beauty of 

 the products of the looms of Sicily, of Florence, 

 Venice, Lucca, and Genoa, and or some Spanish 

 towns, during the middle ages. The materials of 

 which they are made are silk alone, silk and gold, 

 silk and linen, and silk and cotton. When flowers 

 or animals are represented on these damasks, they 

 are conventionally, not realistically, treated, and 

 the designs of most of them are so appropriate and 

 effective, that even the chromolithographs of them 

 are of great value not only to the textile designer, 

 but to students of every branch of decorative art. 



DamasilS, the name of two popes of Rome. 

 DAMASUS I. was born in 306, probably at Rome, 

 became archdeacon of the Roman Church in 355, 

 and pope in 366. The party of Ursinus, the rival 

 of Damasus, were overpowered after a sanguinary 

 struggle of three days in the streets of Rome, and 

 afterwards in the Basilica Liberiana (S. Maria 

 Maggiore), from which 137 corpses were carried out 

 in one day, the 25th October 366. The Emperor 

 Valentinian I. decided in favour of Damasus, and 

 twelve years later, the schism still continuing, an 

 edict of Gratian (378) made him the judge in the 

 case of all the clergy of the hostile party who still 

 lived in Rome. He was a zealous opponent of 

 the Arians, and condemned the Illyrian bishops 

 Ursacius and Valens at a synod Avhich he held 

 at Rome in 368, and Auxentius, Bishop of Milan, 

 at a second synod there in 370. Damasus induced 

 his friend Jerome to undertake the revision of the 

 ItaUa (in 383 and 384), which led him to the pre- 

 paration of the Vulgate version ; and he did much 

 for the preservation and adornment of the Roman 

 catacombs. He died in 384, and was canonised. 

 His festival falls on the ilth December. The 

 writings of Damasus, which are chiefly letters and 

 epigrams, were published at Rome in 1638 (new 

 editions, Rome, 1754, and Paris, 1840). See Langen, 

 Geschichte der romischen Kirche(vo\. i. Bonn, 1881), 

 and Rade, Damasus, Bischof von Rom ( Freiburg, 

 1882). DAMASUS II., previously Poppo, Bishop of 

 Brixen, was elected pope in 1048, through the influ- 



