It will be convenient to make this date—the commencement of “the dark ages”—a halting-place from which to mark how far cotton and the fabrics made from it were appreciated by the nations who were chiefly benefited by the sea-carriage of Indian products in general.
The very ancient Egyptians were apparently unacquainted with cotton. At one time there was considerable discussion concerning the substance from which the swathing bandages of the mummies were woven, and some savants claimed to have discovered cotton amongst them. But the microscope quickly decided that question, for the character and appearance of the fibres of cotton and flax are so markedly different that any young microscopist may distinguish one from the other with ease. It was found that in every case these bandages were made of linen. Negative evidence to the same effect is furnished by the fact that no pictures or other similitude of the cotton plant has been found in Egyptian tombs, whereas accurate representations of flax occur, in its different stages of growth, harvest, and manufacture.[40]
[40] In the Grotto of El Kab are paintings representing, amongst other scenes, a field of corn and a crop of flax. Four persons are employed in pulling up the flax by the roots; another binds it into sheaves; a sixth carries it to a distance; and a seventh separates the linseed from the stem by means of a four-toothed “ripple,” which he uses just in the same way as it is now used in Europe. See Hamilton’s ‘Ægyptiaca,’ Plate xxiii., and Yates’s ‘Textrinum Antiquorum,’ p. 255.
The circumstance mentioned by Herodotus, that King Amasis of Egypt, in sending as a gift to Sparta a corselet padded with cotton and ornamented with gold thread, thought it a fit present from a King, and in dedicating a similar one to Minerva in her temple at Lindus considered it an offering worthy of the goddess, shows that it was at that period a novelty and a rarity. The first knowledge of cotton in Egypt may, I think, be correctly assigned to that date—about B.C. 550. Linen was the principal clothing material of the Egyptians, and the manufacture of it from flax by them is probably of as great antiquity as the growth and wearing of cotton in India. The embalmed bodies of their dead were wrapped in it during successive ages through a period of more than two thousand years, and their priests wore it during the same period, its clean white texture being accepted as a semblance of purity, whereas wool, taken from a sheep, was deemed a profane attire.
Flax and linen are frequently referred to in the Bible. The earliest mention of the former is in Exodus ix. 31, in the account of the plague of hail that devastated Lower Egypt B.C. 1491, and destroyed, when they were nearly ripe for harvest, the two most important crops of the Egyptians—that of the barley on which they relied for food for themselves and for export to other nations, and the flax on which they depended for their clothing and manufacturing employment. For flax was not only used for wearing apparel, but the coarser kinds were employed for making sail-cloths, ropes, nets, and for other purposes for which hemp is generally used.
It is surprising that notwithstanding the comparative proximity of Egypt to India, cotton, which had been for ages so extensively manufactured in the latter country, should have remained so long unknown or unappreciated by a people to whom it would have furnished a cheaper and more comfortable article of dress than the flax-plant. But it is certain that linen was held in favour and the use of it prevailed in Egypt till the Christian era, although the cotton fabrics imported into Berenice were gradually coming into more general wear. Pacatus mentions that Mark Antony’s soldiers wore cotton in Egypt, and says that they felt so much discomfort from the heat that they could hardly tolerate light cotton clothing, even in the shade.
From a passage in Pliny’s Natural History (lib. xix. cap. 1) it would appear that the cotton plant was cultivated in Upper Egypt in his day (A.D. 77), and this has been accepted as genuine and quoted by Dr. Ure[41] and others. But Mr. Yates, in his ‘Textrinum Antiquorum’ (p. 459), shows good reason for believing that the paragraph was interpolated in the text of one of the MSS. of Pliny’s work, after having been originally an annotation in the margin of an earlier copy. This explanation clears up an otherwise involved and disconnected passage, and there are other reasons besides those given by Mr. Yates for believing that his surmise is correct.
[41] ‘The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain.’
Abdollatiph, an Arabian physician who visited Egypt at the end of the twelfth century, does not mention cotton in the account which he wrote (A.D. 1203), of the plants of that country; and Prospero Alpini, the Paduan physician and botanist, who some four centuries later directed his attention to the natural history of Egypt, says[42] that the Egyptians then imported cotton for their use, that the herbaceous kind (Gossypium herbaceum), from which cotton was obtained in Syria and Cyprus, did not grow in Egypt, but that the tree kind (G. arboreum) was cultivated as an ornamental plant in private gardens, and in very small quantities, its down not being used for spinning.
[42] ‘De Plantis Ægypti,’ cap. 18.