We sometimes think that how we do things is the way it’s always been done. But sometimes it’s worth questioning that. The ancient Egyptians were able to weave very fine cloth up to 60 threads per centimetre!¹ How did they do that? Was it by the way we do things, or did they use some other method?While it might be thought that it was the spinning and weaving methods that were necessary to achieve such fine thread counts, the pre-spinning processing was highly significant. In order to achieve fine and neatly aligned flax fibres, the breaking up of fibres, as was carried out in post medieval Europe, was much reduced.

Until very recent times, the dominant means of preparing the flax plant into yarn suitable for weaving has been first by pulling up the plant (pulling gets you longer fibres as they aren’t cut short). Seeds were collected through a process known as rippling, basically, pulling the stems through a wide-mouth comb so that the seeds get knocked off. Then the fibres were retted (rotted). This broke down the flax stems to make the fibres easier to extract from the woody bits of the stem. It got rid of much of the pectin and glues holding fibres together. Retting can be done through keeping fibres wet in water or due retting which involves alternate wetting and drying. Then breaking and scutching whereby the stems are crushed and beaten to free up more fibres took place. Finally, pulling the fibres through a sort of wire brush or comb got rid of more woody bits (hackling or heckling) and fibres were further separated so that hopefully fairly clean fibre was the result.

Unfortunately, it’s not terribly clear as to what the ancient Egyptians did. Indeed, tomb paintings and tomb models seem to show little between the harvest of flax and its twisting into thread. The accumulated evidence however, including experimental archaeology and examination of textiles under a microscope suggests that flax was pulled, rippled (the seeds removed), possibly lightly retted , perhaps crushed (to make the separation process between fibres and waste easier) and then hand-hackled to comb apart the fibres and then spliced (to be discussed in a later blog). There is least evidence for the crushing (breaking) and little evidence for intensive scutching and no evidence for combing or brushing the fibres so that the last of the woody pieces are extracted however, there is a process which may be called hand hackling, though some commentators have called it ‘scutching’. Basically, the fibres were not broken down to the extent which occurred more recently in Europe.

Tomb paintings show the process of pulling flax up by the roots. You can see it here in a New Kingdom (c.1300BC) tomb. The tomb owner and his wife are pulling up stems. You can see seed heads above the straight stems. The fact that the people are dressed in their finest pleated linen suggests that this is not an everyday scene but maybe is meant to show a wonderful harvest in the afterlife. Just look how tall that flax is growing.

Tomb paintings also show other activities around flax as it was harvested. The flax stems are gathered together and the seeds removed. Depictions are clear in the tomb of Menna (below) which is roughly the same date (around 1300 BC). Here you can see men pulling flax through a multipronged tool (rippling). The little red dots are the seeds saved for the next harvest or for oil. The scene may or may not be typical. The seed heads are presumably ripe, so the flax was being harvested at a late stage in growth. Had it been picked earlier, finer fibres could have been extracted.

Here is another scene of rippling:

This one is from the tomb of Paheri (TT 139 at Sheikh Abd el Qurna). The writing shows the conversation between the older man (rippling) and the younger who is carrying bundles to be worked . The old worker says: ‘Even if you bring me 11009 (sheaves), I shall ripple them all’. The young worker is replying: ‘Hurry up and stop talking’

Back to the Menna scene, I’m not 100% sure what is happening on the far right, above the tree. I wondered if the flax was being laid out to dry, or retted. In recent historic times flax would have been retted (rotted) and then hackled to break off the woody parts. In the retting process flax is either put in water or left on dewy fields so that it starts to break down or rett. The tomb of Menna shows the flax in nice neat square patches, maybe it is being wet retted in pools of water.

But, it seems that if retting was carried out at all, it was for a much shorter time than today, due to the need for the stems to contain more integrity and to retain pectin and other gums in the stems. Reduced retting makes the process of splicing, which I will discuss in a later blog, easier (Gleba and Harris 2019, 2337). Experiments have shown that retting is not necessary to splice flax, or if it is used at all, 10 days seems an optimum period².

Mallets or paddles may have been used to crush (break and scutch) flax to remove the woody pieces. But there is no real evidence for this. A group of Middle Kingdom tomb models from Saqqara are sometimes said to show men scutching flax. But more recent interpretations suggest that what is depicted is more likely to have been laundering of cloth (Kemp and Vogelsang Eastwood 2001: 30).

So, if serious breaking and scutching didn’t happen (but remember, just because there are no depictions doesn’t mean it didn’t happen) and there are no depictions of hackling as we would know it , how were fibres obtained?

Some 12th Dynasty tombs (c. 1900BC), so earlier than the harvest scenes shown above, seem to show flax fibres being extracted one a stem at a time³. It looks like the flax is being pulled between two sticks, i.e. decortication or hackling is being carried out by hand. Some Egyptologists have referred to this as ‘scutching’ though I would prefer the term ‘hand hackling’. As this is not a process usually carried out on flax today it is difficult to equate it exactly to modern terms.

It should be pointed out that hackling with metal combs or brushes would have been difficult for the ancient Egyptians at this time as iron was not in used and copper alloys would have been expensive, and thus unlikely to be used in agriculture. Additionally, the need to preserve the integrity of groups of fibres would discourage hackling.

In 1991 Cooke and others, carried out some replication experiments and compared their results with Egyptian fibres. Their experiments which involved slight crushing followed by manual decortication gave the results which were most like the ancient Egyptian ones. Hackling was not carried out. Strips of fibre with some cortex 5-12 cm long and 30-40 μ were obtained.

When un-retted, un-hackled flax is examined by a scanning electron microscope a clumping of fibres can be seen as well as a wide variety in fibre length. The fibre threads are aligned with one another giving a smooth, clean surface. This seems to have been the case with ancient Egyptian flax (Gleba and Harris 2019).

Once the flax was in this ribbon-like state it could then be spliced and spun. But that is a story for later.

Bibliography

Cooke WD., M. El-Carnal and A. Brennan, 1991. ‘The hand-spinning of ultra-fine yarns, Part 2. The spinning
of flax.’ Bulletin de la Centre International d’Etude des Textiles Anciens (Lyon) 69: 17-23.

Gleba, M. and S. Harris. 2019. The First Plant Bast Fibre Technology: Identifying Splicing in archaological textiles. Anthropological and Archaeological Sciences, 11, pp. 2329-2346.

Hudáková, L. 2019. The Representations of Women in the Middle Kingdom Tombs of Officials. Studies in Iconography. Brill.

Kemp, B.J. and G. Vogelsang, 2001. The Ancient Textile Industry at Amarna. London: The Egypt Exploration Society.

Leuzinger, U. and A. Rast-Eicher 2011 ‘Flax processing in the Neolithic and Bronze Age pile-dwelling
settlements of eastern Switzerland’ Vegetation History and Archaeobotany Online Publication

Tylor, J. and J. Griffith 1894. The Tomb of Paheri at El-Kab, London.

1. Kemp and Vogelsang Eastwood 2001, 100. ↩︎
2. Leuzinger and Rast-Eicher 2011 found that retting fibres retted for 10-12 days were easily used for splicing. Kemp and Vogelsang-Eastwood 2001, 30-31, 70-73 obtained useable flax without retting. ↩︎
3. Lubica Hudáková 2019, 43-44 mentions 5 examples of Middle Kingdom flax hand hackling scenes though she calls this ‘scutching’. TT103 Dagi at Thebes and BH 15 Baket III and BH17 Khety at Beni Hasan. are perhaps the best known. ↩︎