[90] Ancient Egyptians, iii. 130.
[91] Church of our Fathers, i. 469.
[92] Mon. Anglic. t. i. p. 382.
[93] Hist. Elien. lib. ii., c. 139, p. 283, ed. Steuart.
Equally interesting to our present subject is the process of twining long narrow strips of gold, or in its stead gilt silver, round a line of silk or flax, and thus producing
Gold Thread.
Probably its origin, as far as flax and not silk is concerned, as being the underlying substance, is much earlier than has been supposed; and when Attalus’s name was bestowed upon a new method of interweaving gold with wool or linen, it happened so not because that Pargamanean king had been the first to think of twisting gold about a far less costly material, and thus, in fact, making gold thread such as we now have, but through his having suggested to the weaver the long-known golden thread as a woof into the textiles from his loom. From this point of view, we may easily believe what Pliny says: “Aurum intexere in eadem Asia invenit Attalus rex; unde nomen Attalicis.”[94] In that same Asia King Attalus invented the method of using a woof of gold; from this circumstance the Attalic cloths got their name.
That, at least for working embroidery, ladies at an early Christian period used to spin their own gold thread, would seem from a passage in Claudian. Writing on the elevation to the consulate of the two brothers Probinus and Olybrius, at the end of the fourth century, the poet thus gracefully compliments their aged mother, Proba, who with her own hands had worked the purple and gold-embroidered robes, the “togæ pictæ,” or “trabeæ,” to be worn by her sons in their office:
Lætatur veneranda parens, et pollice docto
Jam parat auratas trabeas ...