Warp-weighted vertical loom
Telar vertical de pesas y telar horizontal egipcio
- Date
- c. 3000 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Troy (Hisarlik), Turkey and Central Europe; Egypt (ground loom)
- Credited to
- Cultures of Anatolia and the Balkans; Egyptians
- Field
- Tools
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Vertical frame on which the warp hangs tensioned by clay weights, allowing wide woollen pieces to be woven with several heddles. Thousands of loom weights at Troy and across Europe point to the industrial scale of textile production.
The two-beam ground loom appears in Egypt (Badari, c. 4400 BCE) and the vertical two-beam loom in the New Kingdom; the warp-weighted loom is older in Anatolia and Europe (c. 5500 BCE in Hungary according to some), here recorded for its spread in the Bronze Age.
What it led to
- Palace wool industry on an industrial scale (Ur III: 13,000 weavers; Pylos and Knossos: Linear B records)
- Textiles as the chief Mesopotamian export commodity in exchange for metal (Assyrian trade of Kanesh)
- Large-scale dependent female labour and state workshops
- Textiles with complex patterns and tapestries
Built on
- Loom weaving and spindle whorlc. 6500 BCE
- Woolly sheep and wool textilesc. 4000 BCE
- Neolithic horizontal ground loom
- Domestication of the wool sheep
- Spindle with whorl
Made possible
- Sericulture and silk weavingc. 2700 BCE
- Tyrian purple dyec. 1600 BCE
- Gobelins Manufactory1662
- Tapestry
- Purple dye (luxury industry)
- Multiple-heddle loom