I've been reading about the origin of spinning and weaving — specifically E. J. W. Barber's Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton, 1991), a comprehensive and exhausting survey of everything that was known about the subject thirty years ago. I'm dazzled — in part by the author, who turns the story into an adventure, but even more so by our brilliant neolithic ancestors. Some among our forbears, starting perhaps 30,000 years ago, looked at this plant, common flax,
and figured out how to turn it into linen — a complicated, many step process. How did they even begin to imagine such a transformation? Did they examine the plant and say, hey that looks like it will make a nice shirt or a pair of pants? To arrive at such a concept seems like an act of almost preternatural intelligence. After all, there was no template or model. It's not as though there were other fabrics made from other plants fibers. Flax into linen was a first. There were predecessors. Clothes, I imagine, in the form of animal skins or furs, must have been in use. I've read that reeds and other plant materials had been plaited into baskets and nets. But flax into linen was not at all obvious. We can be proud of our ancestors.
Here's a picture of the oldest recovered linen garment: the so-called Tarkhan Dress, which was found in a cemetery near Cairo in 1913 and radiocarbon-dated to between 3482 and 3102 BCE, or 5 and a half millennia ago. It's quite stylish and isn't in much worse shape than some of the favored garments in my own personal wardrobe.
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