 to the organizer for the invitation. This research about blue textiles from ancient Sudan is part of my first doctoral project called Text Meroy. And I will be presenting here results which are mainly the group of Magdalena's study. She's not here today, so I will be presenting this part on her behalf but we told disclaimer, I'm not a dye expert, so I'll be talking under your expertise. So where am I taking you? A little bit of software to Africa, to the Middle and Upper Nile Valley, to the Meretic Kingdom of Kush which is dated from Kierkegaard 350 BC to 350 CE. For those who do not know this context very quickly, there is a Kushite culture which has a lot of pastoral, Sub-Saharan and Sahelian traits but also presents a very interesting synthesis with pharaonic and elinistic influences mainly coming from their powerful neighbor to the North, Egypt. So here's a little snapshot of the type of landscape and object that we find in the Meretic world to the well-known by now symmetry of Meroy. A little bit of experiment filled. The lion headed God Epidemic or the archer king here in Taraka. So the Meretic kings and queens reigned from central Sudan in a town called Meroy but their power was sort of relayed through the Nara Valley through a very dense network of outposts, of administrative but also religious and military which was controlled by quite numerous body of elite members, nobles, members of the military administration and many of them were interred into this type of symmetry with little periods and burial chambers and the meek with quite a lot of objects. It is quite well-known, this type of archeological landscape mainly from the very dense archeological rescuations in Nubia, started in the 60s but up to now as well. And because it is very dry, it's a hyper arid climate, we have a lot of textiles. I don't know if you can see on this actually modified body here, circled in yellow, the remnants of a shroud probably on the torques and pelvis and knee and feet bones. And the symmetry over here, but I give an example, is called Sedinga. And all these textiles, when we look at them as a whole, around the period 100, 300 CE, what we see is a quite homogeneous textile culture. It is defined by the extensive use of cotton, up to 80%, virtually 100% in certain sites with a later increase of wool, but really for these two, three centuries cotton is the big, the most important raw material used. It is permanently S-twisted and assembled on a warp-weighted loom. We have quite a lot of discoveries of loom weights on sediments. Generally it's in a simple tabby weave or extended tabby. Occasionally looped thigh-weave as well for blankets. And one of the characteristic feature is quite often the use of tapestry or embroideries for decoration. A lot of stripes that you can see over there, generally around the lower and upper borders, but also a lot of bands, tapestry bands, with different decor. Pushite in origin, also foreign Egyptian and we see also quite a lot of Hellenistic patterns. On this one over here, you can see a band with tiny, stylized offering tables, for example, with an anchor cross in the middle. One of the characteristic techniques that we see on Meritik Textiles is something called an open work borders lattice, completed by fringes, and bound with these two images over here. And if you're interested in the technique, we also sort of worked on a reconstruction downstairs. It's shown on a poster with one of my colleagues, Ulreka Mokdad from the CTR. In all of these patterns, the tapestry, the stripes, and also sometimes the open work, one predominant aspect of them is the color blue. It's the number one color used. Occasionally we have a little bit of embroidery, but it's also, most of the time, in blue. Few lines, sometimes off right, but it is very, very rare. So really, the blue is everywhere in the Meritik Textile production. And if, like me, you're coming from sort of Egyptian culture, it's quite surprising because when we think of Egyptian textiles, we think of vast expense of white linen. So it has been something that I was always kind of curious about. And when I started looking, even in the foreign textiles, there is actually a little bit of blue, generally on bands or stripes along the borders. And here you have a linen mummy wrapping with blue borders from the B.M. from the Abari. So it occupies a small portion of the cloth. Very rarely we have entirely blue cloth, and it's the case here of the blue kerchief from the embalming catch of Titakhamun. It's very, very rare. Now, when we go a little bit further along the chronology in the late antique and Byzantine textiles, there is much more blue, but actually quite rarely it has been quite difficult to find entirely blue cloth. We have a lot of purple and other colors, but not that much blue. Here's an example that I found represented in a panel painting from the Met. So I was always kind of like, okay, this is different, very thick textiles, a lot of blue. And of course, what comes to mind much more easily maybe even than a foreign or Egyptian textiles is the West African indigo dipops, right? As soon as you start thinking about blue, you think about the twig, the blue man from the Sahara. You have the ivory cloth from Nigeria. Of course, all the Malian textiles, the Dogon tradition, which is represented here by the master indigo dire, Abba-Khafifana from Bamako. So I was really curious and I wanted to try to dig a little bit deeper to go down to the roots of the Meritix passion for indigo. My main questions was where, how did the Meritix used to produce blue textiles? What kind of textiles did they chose to dye blue? And maybe try to see if we can identify a function or maybe even a symbolic meaning for these blue textiles. I don't have a lot of time here, so I chose only one piece to show you because it's quite well documented since I started this research. It's a blue cloth with a tapestry band. It shows meanders, but also little ant crosses at the top of this picture. This is only one fragment of the entire preserved piece. At the bottom you see again this open-work border with the fringes and it's from a symmetry called the Paranoag in Laouanubia, which was the symmetry with the vice-royal of Nubia, so really the top elite part of the population. It comes from the grave 754, which unfortunately has no context information because it was excavated at the beginning of the 20th century and the archives are not as detailed. The radiocarbon date is the mid-2nd, mid-3rd century CE, so really in the middle of this classic Meritix textile production and it is today stored at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. So as you can see on the, or maybe you can see on the microscope pictures, it's cotton, well, well, you have to trust me, maybe, quite well visible with the convalescent of the cotton fiber. And it is only the wet, because it's a wet that is heavy, the wet that is blue pressed with undyed warp. So I took a sample a few months ago at the museum and I sent it to Magdalena at the University of Warsaw, who has been working quite a lot on natural dyes from Nubia and who has now a kind of good understanding of the type of material, et cetera. And our first challenge was the irregular absorption of dyes. You can see on this dynamic picture at the top that the thread was dyed after skinning, so the inside is still white. And here is also a picture of a mechanical object that Magdalena worked on before. And you can see that it has an heterogeneous coverage of the blue dye on an initially yellow thread. So the technique that she used is liquid chromatography affinated with mass spectrometry as a very sensitive analytical tool, hopefully allowing the determination of the dye. So when we talk about blue dyes, it's kind of, it has been difficult to identify the actual plant use. We saw it a bit earlier in this presentation because it has the same chemical signature in the gotten. Mainly produced through the use of two plants, wood, it's at the centauria and the common indigo plant, indigo ferret centauria. And if we look at the map here that has been put together between others by Dominique Carton, we can see that the Nile Valley is at this kind of juncture between the Roach area at the north and Asia and the indigo ferret species. There is also a lot of indigenous indigo ferret species in the African savannas. So I was always kind of, okay, we have this Egyptian Nile Valley, maybe Roach, and now we have all these sub-Saharan indigo plants and we are sort of in the middle. So is there a way to identify the raw material, the raw plant use here? So the high-performance liquid chromatography that was used is, I'm sure many of you know, is the identification of components, of complex mixtures and two steps that basically involve the comparison between a standard sample and the sample of the archaeological objects. Working on comparing the retention times, as well as the absorption spectra and mass spectra. And so, and here, please, I'm really presenting Magdalena's research. So if you have any question, I would refer you to her article at the end, I put the reference. She actually managed to isolate a slight difference between the two plants. Identifying a different ratio of the different die markers between Isatin and Indigotin. And you can see it has a little difference on the tree diagrams up there on the right branch. And so if we consider the different ratio between Isatin and Indigotin in both Indigophera and Isatistintoria, the sort of typical ratio that she identified was if it's under 0.5, it indicates more Isatistintoria. And if it is above 0.5, sometimes well above, it is Indigophera-Tintoria plant. Unfortunately, in our sample, the Isatine peak doesn't even show. It was not preserved, at least not in detectable level and we only have the Indigotin peak. What is still sort of throw is that probably the Isatine peak would have been very low in any case. That's one of the reasons why it's not preserved. So we are really thinking of a ratio well under 0.5 and most probably the use of wood. Which really when we think about it shouldn't be that surprising because Nubia is extremely dry and we know that wood often grows on dry and rocky or sandy soils and that it does occur actually in parts of North Africa. And the hypothetical process was a vat dye. I will not walk you through the entire process here but basically two men steps, the preparation of the vat dye with fresh leaves mixed with hot water and alkaline components and then the immersion of threads for a few hours which once removed and exposed to the air. The dye compound indexial is then precipitating into the Indigotin, the indigo. And this recipe of some sort is actually known by a papyrus from Egypt, a Greek papyrus, dated to about the same period, 300 CE, which does recollect the collection of wood, of wood, sorry, and the dyeing of dark blue with repeated bath during three days. And they're using here urine as an alkaline component. The word wood apparently there has been a little bit of a debate in the translation but it seems fairly secure now but it was the use of esatis. So just to show you a little bit of the range of blue textiles, when I think I talk about the passion for indigo is that really we find these blue patterns in a lot of different techniques and pieces. And here I'm using examples from the site of Cassie Brim because the textiles hadn't been washed after the excavations. They kind of show the light color, beige color of the natural cotton with the blue and it's more visible than in finery textiles. So you see the bands, the tapestry with the lotus flowers but also kind of local interpretation of the so-called gamma figure in blue tapestry and with little miretic designs inside. And also examples of the embroideries that was extensively used on costume. Here you have an example of the blue patterns that were deployed on mostly elite costume and here are the little characters that I extracted from the scene called the miretic chamber in filet and where you can see the type of blonde cloth and decorative aprons at the top but were here quite well preserved in a site called Gebelada in Nubia as well with blue embroidery. And this one is a mental, maybe rather large piece with the enders and the plastica dyed in dark and light blue from Karinog again. And just to conclude, I have been starting to think about the meaning of these blue textiles and when we think about blue in Meretic Sudan, what comes most often is the blue god Amun which was the dynastic god in this period and was a ram-headed god in Nubia. And you have been here represented on a quite striking tapestry from the beginning. And just as food forethought a little bit, when we found fragments of these blue statues, the blue rams that were aligning the processional our way in front of temples, quite often they are actually preserved with blue pligments on the fleece. And so I started really thinking, okay, blue wool, blue fleece and now we have a lot of blue textiles. I don't have much more over evidence but it's very tantalizing. So thank you very much for your attention and you're all invited as well to continue thinking about the question of blue in Copenhagen early next year and much. Thank you very much. Thank you.