Cleveland Museum of Art

Silk Decorative Tunic Band with a Hunter

Date

700s

Medium

Silk: complementary weft-faced twill with inner warps (samit)

Culture

Egypt or Syria, Umayyad period (661–750) or Abbasid period (750–1258)

Department

Textiles

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

This prestigious silk band displays a stylized palmette leaf above a hunter who holds a sword and a shield and pursues a lion and a rabbit. Another fragment with Arabic script indicates Islamic manufacture. Green and ivory silk wefts (horizontal threads) dominate, interlaced by warps (vertical threads) in a diagonal twill weave. A second inner warp does not come to the surface. Such compound structures were woven on large looms with automatic pattern repetition, called drawlooms.

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