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"The Fabric of Everyday
Life: Historic Textiles from Karanis, Egypt," curated by
Thelma K. Thomas, opens September 28, 2001. The essay below situates
the exhibition in its historical and Kelsey contexts.
Historic textiles of
the Roman period and later antiquity (first century BC through
seventh century AD) are rare in many parts of the world, in large
part because these artifacts are composed of fragile organic matter
that survives only in special environmental conditions. Early
in the modern period, around the close of the eighteenth century,
Western travelers discovered that the dry sands of Egypt preserved
textiles in relatively large quantities.
Typically, these cloths are
the shrouds and other grave goods of cemetery settings, so they
yield interesting information about the need for cloth in the
afterlife. The firstand many of the largestmuseum collections
of late antique Egyptian textiles are comprised of acquisitions
from cemetery explorations that could be called, at best, unscientific.
Consequently, the attribution of a late antique Egyptian textile
to its place of discovery is, all too often, mere speculation
based on sketchy tips provided by a dealer (who might have mingled
textile lots from various sites or mentioned a well-known site
to enhance the prestige of his merchandise) or on comparisons
to textiles from the few sites with some archaeological documentation.
The Kelsey Textiles from Karanis
It is these concerns of preservation and attribution that
distinguish the Kelsey's 3,500 Roman-period and late antique textiles
from Karanis, Egypt, found in the 1920s and 1930s. The dry climate
in which they were discovered provided the conditions necessary
to their survival, and all the pieces are securely attributed
to Karanis. Indeed many of them can be assigned to specific locations
within the site, thus yielding precious information about the
use of cloth in the settings of daily life.
Karanis was founded in the
late Ptolemaic period (mid third century BC) in Egypt's fertile
Fayoum basin, which was being developed for its agricultural potential.
The town grew during the Roman period (beginning in the first
century BC) to reach the height of its prosperity in the second
half of the third century AD, at the beginning of the period called
"late antiquity." Most Karanis textiles should probably
be assigned dates during the Roman period and late antiquity.
Papyri
The town was discovered around the turn of the twentieth century,
when excavators were searching for papyrian ancient form of paper
on which were written letters, inventories, official contracts
and prayers, and works of literatureall highly prized by scholars
of Egypt's later Greek and Roman periods. Karanis did indeed yield
great quantities of papyri, but the site was also extraordinarily
rich in other artifacts, from large architectural complexes to
tiny beads. In fact, F. W. Kelsey, the Museum's founder and organizer
of the Karanis expedition, seems to have dubbed the site "the
Pompeii of Egypt," recognizing the rarity of so complete
a glimpse of Roman Egyptian town life.
A computer component of the exhibition "The Fabric of Everyday Life" will allow Museum visitors to look up key excerpts from texts about cloth written on papyri from Karanis. These documents provide information available in no other form about, for instance, the textile industry and the monetary values assigned to particular textile goods. Most of these papyri are housed in the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection and are accessible on line via the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) at http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap.
Modern Documents
In addition to ancient
papyri, a number of modern documents have proved useful in organizing
the exhibition on Karanis textiles. One is a 1934 article from
The Ann Arbor Daily News (fig. 1), which conveys the sense
of excitement that the Karanis expedition generated when it was
under way by quoting archaeologist Enoch Peterson: "From
a dead and buried city we have learned of the life of a living
people." The article also declares that "the excavations
carried on at the site of Karanis over the past 10 years have
given us both an accurate and complete account of the life there;
the houses the people lived in, the streets where they walked
or rode on donkey back, the furniture they used, the paintings
that adorned their walls, the clothes they wore, the household
objects of wood, pottery, glass, faience, bronze, and bone, the
harness rope and basketry."
In the catalogue for her 1983
exhibition, Karanis: An Egyptian Town in Roman Times, Elaine
Gazda celebrated this aspect of the site in more considered, less
breathless prose: "The town of Karanis occupies a unique
place in the annals of Egyptian and Graeco-Roman archaeology.
Although no more than a rustic agricultural village in the Fayoum
oasis, it looms large for us because it provides a microcosm of
life as it was lived by ordinary people under Greek and Roman
rule." "The Fabric of Everyday Life" continues
to explore this information about daily life, but it is unique
in its focus on the textiles. Another useful document for understanding
the Karanis textiles is Lillian Wilson's Ancient Textiles from
Egypt in the University of Michigan Collection (1933), which
provides catalogue entries for about 1 percent of the textiles
from Karanis and is based in large part on an unpublished study
by the English scholar Thomas Midgley. Both studies identified
findspots when known, but neither exploited this information for
what it might say, for example, about the social settings in which
particular kinds of cloth were found. Aside from coins that might
provide a specific dateanother rarity for late antique textilesthe
other items that were found with cloth artifacts have usually
been overlooked. "The Fabric of Everyday Life" will
make use of reconstructed assemblages and their typical contextsinterior
rooms, courtyards, and rubbish heapsto reveal important insights
into cloth manufacture and mending, as well as the practices of
use, reuse, and ultimately rejection of a textile.
Museum Resources
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Archival photographs are also crucial to what has turned out to be an expedition into "museum archaeology" in preparation for this exhibition. Such images provide visual evidence that complements the sometimes spotty written records and mapping efforts for these excavations, which were never published in their entirety. Some of these photographs record discovery sites for which there are no maps or written records; others record textiles that were not acquired by the Kelsey and that, in all probability, no longer survive (e.g., fig. 2) .
One archival photograph (fig.
3) organizes a selection of textiles found during several years
of excavation, thus recording their condition upon discovery.
This information is extremely useful because, although the textiles
have been cleaned since their acquisition, no records of any treatments
were kept. "The Fabric of Everyday Life" will display
a small but representative selection of textiles in conjunction
with archival photographs relevant to their interpretation.
Yet another important context for the research represented in
"The Fabric of Everyday Life" has been important exploratory
work by longtime Kelsey Museum volunteer Ann Van Rosevelt in identifying
assemblages with cloth. In addition, my own surveys of the Kelsey
textile collection and the Karanis archives have benefited immensely
from a massive reorganization of the archives and reconfiguration
of the Museum's database. My survey of the textiles, begun in
the late 1980s, has been greatly facilitated by their placement
in the early 1990s in the spacious cabinets of the Museum's Sensitive
Artifact Facility and Environment (SAFE) (fig. 4).
The Textiles Themselves
In the Karanis textiles
themselves, visitors to "The Fabric of Everyday Life"
will encounter plain, worn fragments with little visual appeal
(fig. 5). Upon examination and reflection, however, these pieces
exert an extraordinary power to evoke past lives. Once, these
rags were part of clothes that were worn next to the skin, rugs
that were walked on, or bags that carried life-sustaining food.
They are thus extremely "intimate artifacts," as one
archaeologist calls them. The exhibition will attempt to foreground
that sense of intimacy, in part by asking viewers to think of
analogies for the use of cloth in their own lives.
The exhibition will also present ancient images of textiles as a way to reveal conceptions of them quite different from the plain examples found at the site. For example, one particular set of images from Karanis, iconic wall paintings, envisions special textiles worn by divinities (fig. 6). These sacred devotional images represented for the inhabitants of Karanis a quality of cloth that they did not expect to encounter in their everyday lives.
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A Team Effort
This exhibition project
is a team effort. Consultants Mark Nielson and Steve Hixson are
coordinating exhibition design. Preparator Dana Buck is making
the design tangible. Conservator Brook Bowman has prepared and
vetted the textiles and other objects for display and is assisting
with exhibition design. Robin Meador-Woodruff responds promptly
and graciously to my special demands for photography. Although
many volunteers and students have worked with me on this project,
special thanks go to Kelly Goodknecht (Kalamazoo College), research
assistant extraordinaire, who organized vast amounts of information
from the archives, the database, and the registry, and to Melanie
Grunow (IPCAA), who is programming the touch-screen computer for
the exhibition. Finally, the project owes a great debt to Ann
Van Rosevelt for her many contributions over the years to the
preservation and study of these textiles.
Thelma K. Thomas
Copyright © 2001 The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan. All rights reserved.