Silks of the near East

The history of silk in the Near East begins in Syria in the Roman period, with cloth and yarn of the Han dynasty imported from China. Some of the cloth may well have been the delicate Chinese gauze, because during the first two centuries A.D. Roman writers were scandalized by its transparency, saying that the wearers were clothed only to be unclothed. Other types, damasks and embroidered silks, dating from the first to the third centuries, were excavated at Palmyra, the great city in the Syrian desert, abandoned in 273. We know that silk yarn was imported, and woven locally, because fabrics of Chinese silk yarn were found at Palmyra, and at Dura on the Euphrates, dating before 256 A.D., in which the threads are tightly spun, a practice which the Chinese did not then apply to silk. This is most likely the explanation of the classical story that Chinese silk cloth was unraveled and then rewoven; evidently the hanks of Chinese yarn were unrolled, spun in the Near Eastern fashion, and then woven. The weaving of fabrics of Chinese silk yarn was done in the Syrian cities of Antioch, Berytos, Tyre, and possibly Gaza. Besides the imported silk it is possible, if we accept Pliny's Assyrian bombyx, that there was wild silk in the Near East, similar to the tussah silk of India, as several fragments of this nature were excavated at Palmyra, one at Dura, and another in Egypt. In the first few centuries A.D. Syrian traders and Christian pilgrims brought silk fabrics to Italy, France, and Spain. By the fourth century silk garments, former-