Detour on the Silk Road

By Harvey Leifert

Your silk scarf or tie winds a long way back in history. By 1600 b.c., and possibly a millennium earlier, the Chinese had domesticated a wild silk moth, Bombyx mandarina, into B. mori, and had begun making fabric from the roughly half-mile strand of silk that constitutes its cocoon. Scholars have long presumed that for many centuries sericulture was an exclusively Chinese industry. But a new study shows that South Asians mastered the craft at least as long ago as the Chinese.

Irene L. Good of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum and two colleagues studied tiny bits of fiber attached to ancient copper jewelry fragments. The fragments came from Harappa and Chanhu-daro, two archaeological sites in present-day Pakistan that were part of the great Indus civilization that flourished from 2800 to 1900 b.c.

Using an electron microscope, Good determined the Indus fibers to be silk, but not from B. mori moths. They came, rather, from two South Asian silk moth species not exploited in China: Antheraea assamensis and A. mylitta. (The species have distinctively shaped silk-extruding orifices, and the fibers’ texture varies accordingly.) Some of the fibers were also not as highly processed as Chinese silk.

South Asians were apparently producing homegrown silk two millennia before the Chinese began officially exporting it, around 115 b.c. That may explain the origin of similar silk fibers found in Central Asia that predate the era of Chinese trade. (Archaeometry)

You can read Dr. Irene Good's entire article in this pdf. She also has a web page dedicated to her research. www.ancientcloth.org includes some beautiful photographs of silk garments.

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References:
Leifert, Harvey. 2009. "Detour on the Silk Road:South Asians mastered silk-making independently from the Chinese". Natural History Magazine. June 2009. Available online: http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/samplings/111051/detour-on-the-silk-road
Picture Credits: 
First: Natural History Magazine. June 2009.
Second: Ancient Cloth.org. 1995. Captioned: Safavid Jacket from the Iran Bastan Museum, Tehran.