I’d like to briefly aside into another way of making fabric without looms, which would be knitting, crocheting, or other ways of making knots with fiber. These ways use tools to help make repeated knots, and those knots together work well for creating a fabric with a stretch that can be everything from feather light and lacy to heavy and near weatherproof— especially if it has felting done to it.
There is a reason I want to talk about it this early.
You probably know about that Roman dodecahedron knitting-fingers-for-gloves tool that has been flying around the internet for a decade. These tools have been found in Roman sites all around the outskirts of Rome. The first one was found in the 1700’s. No one quite knows what they were made for, although there have been many, many theories throughout the centuries.
Internet knitters have decided it’s a tool for knitting fingers of gloves. There are a few reasons that is unlikely. While gloves have been around for millennia (there is evidence to think they are prehistoric), knitting has not. Early gloves were made of woven fabric or animal skins. King Tut’s gloves, found beautifully preserved in his tomb, were made of woven linen. Knitting can be traced to only about 1000ce, a good 600 years before we hear of knitting anywhere.
Even if we look at knitting the way we look at looms, and understand that two sharp sticks would never make it into the archaeological record, unlike weaving, we have no fabrics or fragments of anything knitted. We have no images of knitted items. There is no myth surrounding knitting, no ancient tales of people knitting straw into gold, no etymological path to follow. There is no historical record of knitted items, at all, until about 1000. It seems obvious that knitting didn’t arrive fully complete suddenly, but there is ample reason to think of it as a more recent innovation from what we commonly call the Middle East and moved through the Eastern Mediterranean into Europe.
This may sound very late for knitting, and knitting does show up in journals and reports as being older than 1000 years, it’s now generally accepted these were mistakes. Archaeologists and scholars had been calling ‘nalbinding’ ‘knitting’ when they discovered pieces of a knotted thread, which, again, craftspeople sought to correct that mistake when presented with samples of early knitting in museums. Reviewing and analyzing the research has shown that once again, knitting is just over 1000 years old.
Going back to this mysterious Roman item, there is nothing about them that says knitting aide. They are mostly delicate, some have wax on them, they are often found with coins. They show no signs of wear, they do not have numbers inscribed on them, and the largest of them weigh over two pounds. They may be religious (that’s a possibility no matter what item is found- it’s a first guess for everything), it may not have a use at all, and some people wonder if they may have been just a final metallurgical exam to show your skills. And the knitting we have from 1000ce is about 32 stitches an INCH. This tool creates a very coarse finger for a glove even in modern times. It seems a stretch that a very expensive object would be used to make coarse fingers on extremely fine gloves that were made with much cheaper needles.
And it completely ignores that the same shape was found in South East Asia along the silk road that *predates* the Roman items, but were created as gold beads, and not large enough to be used as a tool for anything.
Using different points of view is important (see ‘nalbinding’ mistaken for knitting), but it’s also important to keep an open mind and not think anyone group has the one true answer.
Later, we will explore more fiber.
