Fig. 38.—Hand of Penelope clutching her shuttle. From a corner of a piece of sculpture discovered by O. Kern and described by C. Robert, (The Feet Washing of Odysseus, fifth Century B.C., Mitt. Kais. Deutsch. Arch. Inst., Athens, XXV., 1900, pp. 332-3). The author considers Penelope to be in the act of unravelling what she has woven: “We see her holding the spool with her right hand, while the left hand, half closed, is raised to about shoulder high, and the fingers, if I read the traces correctly, are posed as though she held a thread.”
The Greeks evidently used a spool in weaving, that is a piece of stick round which was wound the thread that became the weft, as is shown in the hand of Penelope, [Fig. 38], and in Kirke’s loom, [Fig. 15].
FOOTNOTES:
[E] I find frequent references, by various writers, to an upright loom mentioned by E. H. Palmer as used by a Bedawin woman near Jebel Musa, but on looking up his description (The Desert of the Exodus, I. p. 125), I find it to be so indifferent as to be quite useless for purposes of comparison.
[F] My attention to this was kindly drawn by Mr. F. N. Pryce, Assistant in the Dept. of Greek and Roman Antiquities.
[G] The existence of warp weighted looms amongst the prehistoric Lake Dwellers of Switzerland was first surmised by Pauer (Keller’s Lake Dwellings) from the discovery of the weights, and was made practically certain by Messikommer and Jentsch.
[H] Comparing the loom Olafsson saw with the description in the Nial Saga, he concludes this sort of loom was in use A.D. 1014, in the North of Scotland.
[I] He criticises the detail of the illustration of Penelope’s loom. It must be remembered this illustration is not a technical drawing, but an artist’s representation where correctness of detail cannot be expected. In his own drawing of the Egyptian horizontal loom many of the warp threads are shown over instead of under the laze rods, and yet this is supposed to be a correct technical drawing!
[J] Since writing Dr. Porter has sent me photograph of another sort of loom in which weights are used as counter balances to keep the heddles raised. The subject requires further elucidation.