THE ANCIENT USES OF FIBERS. 11 



THE ANCIENT USES OF FIBERS. 



It has already been noted as an interesting fact, though in no wise a 

 remarkable one, that the most valuable commercial fibers of to-day 

 were the prominent libers of ancient times, illustrating, in a word, the 

 survival of the fittest. Flax, cotton, hemp, the liliaceous fibers, many of 

 the palms, reeds, and grasses were known and valued in past ages on 

 both hemispheres, being employed in connection with the common animal 

 fibers, as wool, hair, and silk. When or how vegetable fibers first came 

 to be used will never be known, but it is possible that they were first 

 employed in aiding man to secure his food, as the natives of every 

 country from the burning tropics to the frigid north have drawn 

 largely upon the resources of the vegetable kingdom for their fish 

 lines and nets. And it might further be conjectured that the rude 

 knotting of the twisted filaments of fiber in the form of nets may have 

 first suggested weaving and the substitution of vegetable clothing for 

 the skins of animals. 



Flax has a greater antiquity than any of the fibers of which we have 

 knowledge, for its cultivation goes back to the Stone Age in Europe. 

 It is known to have been manufactured by the Swiss Lake Dwellers, a 

 people contemporaneous with the long-extinct mammoth and other 

 great mammals of the Quaternary Epoch, as specimens of the straw, 

 fiber, fabrics, etc., prepared by them are preserved in the museums. It 

 is supposed that the species cultivated at that remote period of the 

 world's history, concerning which no written records remain, was Linum 

 angustifolium, while at a later period, though still remote by four or five 

 thousand years, the Egyptians cultivated the species known to-day as 

 commercial flax {Linum usitatissimum). 



Before the books of Genesis and Exodus were written the Egyptians 

 were skilled in spinning and weaving flax, for both the culture and the 

 manufacture of this textile are pictorially carved upon the bas-reliefs 

 and upon the walls of palaces, temples, and tombs. Egyptian fabrics 

 of linen 4,500 years old and preserved in the museums and among 

 the mummy cloths — fabrics from the most delicate tissues to linen-like 

 sailcloth — have been found, and as many as 300 yards were sometimes 

 used to enwrap one body. The linens were both white and dyed in col- 

 ors — yellow, red, and purple — and they were handsomely embroidered. 

 Spinning and weaving in Bible times were household industries, as we 

 are assured by many references to women and flax. The Phoenicians 

 did much to extend the culture of flax and the art of weaving linen, as 

 their ships plowed the Atlantic more than three thousand years ago, 

 even journeying to Britain, for they were a nation of traders, and there 

 is every reason to believe that the Chaldeans excelled in spinning and 

 weaving flax, while the Babylonians centuries before Christ were noted 

 for their luxury and the high state of development of their textile art, 

 flax, cotton, and wool being manufactured by them. 



