The humble early efforts at decoration, called by the French “primitif,” are the first we know and class, and are found in all savage attempts at ornament. This style consists mainly of straight lines, zigzags, wavy lines, dots, and little discs.[19]
Gold discs of many sizes, and worked with a variety of patterns, are found equally in the tomb of the warrior at Mycenæ, and in Ashantee, accompanied in both cases with gold masks covering the faces of the dead. The discs or buttons remind us of those found in Etruscan tombs, though the execution of these last is more advanced. They appear to be the origin of the “clavus” or nail-headed pattern woven into silks in the Palace of the Cæsars. The last recorded survival of this pattern is in woven materials for ecclesiastical purposes in the Middle Ages.
Of very early needlework we only find here and there a fragment, illustrated occasionally by passing allusions in poetry and history.
The ornamental art of Hissarlik[20] is so primitive that we cannot feel that it has any resemblance to that described as Trojan by Homer, who probably adorned his song with the art he had known elsewhere.[21]
We know not what the actual heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey wore; but we do know that what Homer describes, he must have seen. Was Homer, therefore, the contemporary of the siege of Troy?—or does he not rather speak of the customs and costumes of his own time, and apply them to the traditions of the heroic ages of Greece? Whatever be the date of Homer himself, we can, with the help of contemporary survivals, reconstruct the house and the hall, and even furnish them, and clothe the women and the princes, the beggars and the herdsmen.
From the remains of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian art we can perceive their differences and their affinities. It is from textile fragments, found mostly in tombs, that we obtain dates, and can suggest them for other specimens.
The funeral tent of Shishak’s mother-in-law, at Boulac, is most valuable as showing what was the textile art of that early period.[22]
Fig. 1.
Egyptian corselet. (Wilkinson’s “Ancient Egyptians.”)