All honour is due to certain manufacturers at Lyons who are working in the spirit of the old masters, and have been seriously considering how best to reproduce the beautiful soft surface of the gold thread of which the secret was lost in the fifteenth century.[223]
The old Chinese flat gold was, about the sixteenth century, superseded by what was manufactured in Spain, and is no longer imported or, perhaps, even made.
6. SILK.
The origin and history of silk is learnedly and elaborately discussed in Yates’ “Textrinum Antiquorum.” He gives us his authorities, and literal translations for the benefit of the unlearned, who cannot read the original texts. I have availed myself without hesitation of his quotations, and of the carefully considered opinions he has drawn from them.
It has been already said that wool and flax preceded silk in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman manufactures. There is no certain mention of silk in the Books of the Old Testament.[224] Silk is, however, named in the Code of Manu.[225]
No shred of silk has been found in any Egyptian tomb, nor till lately, and with one exception only, in those of the Greeks.
Auberville says, “La soie ne fit son apparition en Europe que 300 ans avant notre ère.”[226]
Pamphile, daughter of Plates, of Cos, is said by Aristotle to have there first woven silk (300 B.C.). Probably raw silk was brought to Cos from the interior of Asia, and Pamphile is by some supposed to have “effilèd” the solid manufactured silks, and woven them again into gauzy webs. Yates suggests that it is possible that Pamphile obtained cocoons and unwound them, as the passage in Aristotle may be so interpreted.
The specimen of early silk-weaving which we have above alluded to, was taken out of the “Tomb of the Seven Brothers” at Kertch, in the Crimea, and is of the third century B.C. It consists of several bits of very transparent painted silk. These fragments are an actual and yet a contemporary witness to the truth of the tradition of Pamphile’s Coan webs, which are of the same date: possibly they were her handiwork.