 Yes. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today. When going through the various collections and catalogues of so-called Cap-Coptic textiles, the uniformity of the complex silkweaves always puzzled me. Compound silks and their wooden predecessors come in repeating patterns that seem to be absolutely identical. Are there really no differences between the single pieces? Those two pieces, both found in Egypt, one in the British Museum and one in the Victorian Albert Museum, even got confused by specialists. So one of the questions I'm asking is, where do those pieces come from? Why are they so similar? Do they perhaps come from the same cloth? The complex fabrics I'm researching are worked in the technique of twilder mask, weft-faced compound tabby, also called takte, and weft-faced compound twill, also called samite. With a deeper understanding of those fabrics came more and more questions. Where were those fabrics produced? What did the looms look like to repeat the pattern mechanically, who had access to silk into this technology as early as the third to 4th century AD or even before? And what besides the silk is a connection to the hand-time warp-faced compound fabrics from China. I have to admit, this talk does not provide any answers to those questions. It is rather a short glimpse into my ongoing PhD and giving an idea on how to find answers. I am concentrating on complex silks that have been found within the area of the Roman Empire and its successors. The time frame goes up to the Byzantine early Islamic age and to document the changes in the fabrication and distribution. The goal is to put the pieces into their historical context. Questions on diverse topics shall be answered, but the central question of course is to find the place, or at least the region, of production of the silks and the distribution. The answers will be found, hopefully, by an intense study of textile finds but also of written sources and pictorial evidence. The early pieces from the western part of the Roman Empire were luxurious late Roman burials from the 3rd to 5th century and they yielded complex silk fabrics. Later western complex silks are known from the early medieval reliquaries and church treasuries. Some few examples have been discovered at excavations in Syria and Israel, but the main amount of compound silks now stored in museums all over the world comes from Egypt. They were brought to light in the late 19th and early 20th century and hundreds of pieces are now in the museums. Most of the silks lack a proper documentation due to their early discovery and the rush for artifacts back then. Some cemeteries are of course known for the richness of the burials and the luxury of the garments of the dead, for example Antinue and Akhmin, both roughly dated to 39th century AD. In my research I analyzed the compound weaves visually using binocular or transportable gear like a dynamite. A detailed decomposition is necessary to reveal the manufacturing process as well as the design process behind these fabrics, including the tracing of irregularities, of course you will see that later. Knowing how these fabrics were produced gives many details about the setup of the loom and the developments that took place in pattern weaving from the 3rd to 8th century AD. But with this diverse material where to start I picked one of well the largest group. It's the so-called Akhmin silks with more than 100 objects in museums collections. They are at the latest edge of my research dating to 7th to 9th century AD. Judging from the Viennese linen tunic which is preserved completely, there are sets of matching silk decorations which once were applied to tunics, roundels, derbicoli, broad rectangular decorations which were applied to the sleeves called Maniki. This is only half of one sleeve decoration, you have to make a mirror petal to make it whole again. And of course the clave ending with a stigana. The decorations show the same central motif with leaves, tendrils and buds. All have in common that the main pattern is framed by a border of vivid plant design. These decorations have been woven in a large silk cloth on the purpose to be cut out and used as sewn on decorations on tunics. They have a pattern repeat in weft direction. Here you see some details of a piece in the BNA that shows some irregularities in the pattern that are mirrored on the second half. Some mites feature two warp systems, a very short glimpse into the technical details, I don't want to annoy you with things like that. But some things I have to mention, they have two warp systems, one for the twill binding and one for the patterning, which is called main warp. And then there are two wefts working parallel and the main warp, the pattern warp, determines which weft is seen on the front and which weft is seen on the back. So that's the main thing of some mites and the te, which works just the same, just in tagging binding. Here some wrong pattern shafts have been selected and you see, for example, cream line appearing here, it's just a wrong pattern shaft, wrong pattern thread selected, which mirrors in the mirrored pattern repeats. Orbically and monochrome have the same width with approximately 22 centimeters and they show the already mentioned mirror pattern repeat. The clavy have only half the width and show just one pattern repeat, no mirror pattern repeat. When counting the number of main warp threads, the warp for patterning, it soon became clear that these decorations have matching numbers of threads per pattern repeat. All had plus minus 215 threads per pattern repeat. Of course, I counted other patterns as well, those had completely different numbers in the pattern repeat. So is there a possibility of all these different decoration elements being woven on the same loom and perhaps even in the same warp? Of course, one has to check technical details first and to see if they are all the same like twist of war, color, etc. But if this applies and this design is the same too, they can be checked for relations. We'll see that later. First to the question of production batches. There are several fragments which help to reconstruct the size of one production batch as they are showing pattern repeats weft and warp wires. This is a detail of the tunic from the Victorian Arabic Museum and you can see on the clavy that the lower part is exactly the same, while the upper part where you can see the plant moving on the back, this part is mirrored. So we do have the roundels and we do have the rectangular pieces and mirrored clavy. One second fragment in the, so this is a repeat in the weft direction which is mirrored again. The width of two clavies is the width of one or recourse. One other fragment shows pattern repeats in warp direction. As I told you, those sleeve decorations that come with two riders, a central metal young and then mirrored riders, there is no central metal young. It's cut between two fragments. So it's one full sleeve panel down there, one full sleeve panel up there. Other fragments show similar features. So there's one wrinkles in paper in the collection of the Deutsches Testium Museum and there is a seam allowance which has been folded under the piece when it was so known and when you unfold it you see the start of the second around you and in between a very faint line. This dotted mark may be perhaps a weaving fold or maybe a cutting mark that has been missed. The largest piece of Aghmin silk with Palmet border comes from Dombarton Oaks in Washington. It features four roundels in row in weft direction and the cloth is 97 centimeters wide. It has no selvages so we don't know if it was even wider on top of the cloth. You see a second row of roundels but has been cut. So again there is pattern repeat in weft direction and pattern repeat in warp direction. We can see that these silks have same technical features on the same pattern. We know they have the same number of main warp threads in one pattern repeat. We also know that several decorations were woven in one warp at the same time and that the pattern was repeated mechanically. If we take the tunic at the Bitterian Albert Museum as a blueprint for one set of decorations we need two sleeve panels and two clave both with a mirrored pattern and four orbically for one tunic. All of these can be woven in the same warp width. When you add them in the same warp width you get an approximate length of 360 centimeters. Judging from the width of about one meter including selvages there can be decorations for four tunic being woven at the same time. Drawing in completely preserved silks are mired from Sanxeverine in Cologne which has another pattern but is technically very similar. It might be even more up to 150 centimeters with 12 pattern repeats. This is showing a little bit the amount of silk decorations that has been produced and that could be produced in one production batch. But of course this is only hypothesis so far. We do not yet know if the different decoration parts have been woven in the same warp. Orbate the pattern width of clave and orbically is a very strong indicator that it may be so. But of course it would be also possible that only roundels were woven in one cloth and the next cloth had just sleeve panels on it but both have been woven in the same warp setup. To prove of several decorations came from the same production batch. The weaving irregularities are an essential part of the research. The weaving irregularities would go through the full length of the warp with warp irregularity and through the full width of the weft. Several different irregularities were yet recorded irregularities in the material errors that are called before the actual weaving and errors that occurred during the weaving. These irregularities help us with the chigsaw of the objects as we gain information on the weaving process like the mounting direction of weave change of weft bobbins and of the general setup of the loom. They form an individual pattern that helps to trace objects that once came from the same warp. Here you will recognize again the two pieces from the first slide. The two sleeve panel halves from Victorian Albert and British Museum. It's very interesting because both have been acquisitioned by the museums in the late 19th century, 1887 and in 1904 or the 20th century but some years apart that both show the same error and irregularities in warp and in weft direction. For example a double binding warp which shows here marked with one in the sketch or number two a change in the twill direction so there was a miscounting here in the warping. This affects just the binding and has no real effect on the pattern but when you look at the fabrics closely you will see this and it happens quite often. And in weft direction marked with number three there's another mark which tells us that they have been woven as one piece. It's a weft that is double and which goes through both pieces as the cutting was not done exactly horizontal. There's even a fourth marker which tells us the direction of the weave because here number four there is a broken warp thread which is fully complete in the upper half and the lower half suddenly the warp ends and for a small part there is no warp in this place and then a blue warp was inserted. So why all this matchmaking? First grouping the text stars helps us to classify the contexts and it helps to classify themselves and it adds to the text stars because there's so many information given on the weaving process and on the looms. Furthermore it's important to find out if there was a warp-wise pattern repeat as well because in the third to eighth century important technological changes in weaving took place which contributed to our modern lifestyle by laying the foundations of computing. Warp-wise pattern repeat must be saved somehow if there's not just two other one go and one repeated go. The complex weaves got more and more sophisticated and some kind of standard weave for pattern silks emerged. The predecessors of the drawlium and maybe the drawlium itself was invented in this time but we do know not yet where it was invented, how it looked like and how it exactly worked. More knowledge on this will bring us closer to the place of the origin of the compound fabrics but as the title is Reconstructing the Practical Approach I have some treat for you as well. We do have, I'm very very happy that we do have this small research project in Krefeld funded by the Sparkersen Kulturstiftung. The German Textamuseum in Krefeld in the Haus der Seidenkultur joined the knowledge and the workforce in this project called Silksblender from Antiquity Recreated. It is running until December and combines theory and practical approach. The German Textamuseum holds a remarkable collection of row into early medieval compound fabrics and we did choose some for reconstruction on grounds of their pattern width. So pattern width of this one is eight pattern walkways, 35 pattern walkways, 64 pattern units per pattern width and again 215. The second pillar of the project are the silk weavers from the Haus der Seidenkultur. They are silk weavers which were educated as such, some on jacquero looms and they really contribute a lot with all their knowledge and their experience in silk weaving. Together we develop patterns looms adapts in our weaving samples and as always in reconstructed projects time is an issue but with their help it's really easy to get to those reconstructions and as an output of the workshop, as an output of the project of course we are setting up a workshop which addresses curators, archaeologists, conservators and it teaches the decomposition of the late Roman compound weaves and gives some hands-on experience. The best way to learn and to sustainable learning is learning with your hands and so you're all heartfelt invited to come to Krefeld in 2020 to learn about compound weaves.