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Women’s Work, the First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
Elizabeth Wayland Barber
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 334 pp., $23.00.
For over 20,000 years, until the Industrial Revolution, the fiber arts were a major economic force that belonged primarily to women. But until recently not much has been known about the earliest textiles and the lives of the people who spun and wove them. Cloth is so perishable that little of it has survived antiquity to be discovered by archaeologists. But thanks to the latest high-tech innovations—for example, radiocarbon dating, infrared photography for seeing through unremoveable dirt and thin-layer chromatography for analyzing dyes—the scraps that do remain can be newly interpreted. Archaeologist and textile historian E. W. Barber draws on these high-tech studies and on ancient texts, myths and linguistics to reconstruct an important missing chapter in the cultural and economic history of women. Barber traces spun fiber to the Paleolithic era, about 20,000 B.C., when women in southeastern Europe made string skirts. Much later, in Mesopotamia, about 2000 B.C., independent businesswomen wove textiles at home for sale abroad. Barber has also gathered evidence from Egypt to Scandinavia and from Greece to Sumatra. The book includes 79 illustrations—photos, drawings and maps; one photo shows the oldest preserved body garment, a finely pleated linen shirt from an Egyptian tomb dating to 3000 B.C.
First Civilizations: Cultural Atlas for Young People
Erica C. D. Hunter
(New York: Facts on File, 1994), 96 pp., $17.95.
Far more than a conventional atlas, this richly illustrated book presents the political, social, cultural, religious and economic histories of the ancient peoples of the Near East, particularly Mesopotamia. Young people will not be intimidated by the length of the book, and they will be attracted to the hundreds of photos, maps, charts and vivid reconstruction drawings of ancient sites. The book is divided into two parts. Part one traces the development of hunter-gatherer societies to village and then city life. Part two chronicles the succession of empires in the region, beginning with the Semitic king Sargon of Agade (2234–2279 B.C.) and ending with Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Persian empire in 331 B.C. Each two-page spread presents a new, visually appealing chapter; for example, in part one, “Archaeology in the Near East,” “Ziggurats,” and “First Farmers (11,000–9300 B.C.),” and, in part two, “Rival Kingdoms (2000–1600 B.C.),” “Assyria Triumphant (750–626 B.C.)” and “Archaeology, War and Looting.” The text and captions are readable as well as scholarly, and the book includes a useful glossary, gazetteer, index and illustrated table of dates.
Women’s Work, the First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
