Image Details

COURTESY OF THE BADÈ MUSEUM, PACIFIC SCHOOL OF RELIGION

CREATING CLOTH. Cloth production was a complex process: Raw fibers needed to be turned into thread, and thread to cloth. The tools pictured here—a spindle and four whorls—would have been used to spin fibers such as wool into thread. The wool was attached to one end of the spindle, with a whorl on the other. The whorl weighted the spindle, which helped keep the wool taut and the spindle rotating. The spindle pictured here is a replica of one used in the ancient world. The whorls were discovered at Tell en-Nasbeh and probably date to the Iron Age.