[HN Gopher] Evidence of the use of silk by Bronze Age civilization
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Evidence of the use of silk by Bronze Age civilization
Author : geox
Score : 158 points
Date : 2024-12-02 16:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Silk residues were successfully detected, which confirmed the
| early use of silk as a material carrier to communicate between
| Heaven and Earth_
|
| That last bit seemed to jump out of nowhere. Maybe I'm missing
| some implications of the grid-like oval bronze thing? Very
| mysterious.
| jhwhite wrote:
| I'm probably wrong but since it was discovered in a sacrificial
| pit I assumed the bronze age people burned the silk as a way to
| "communicate with heaven".
| pempem wrote:
| Still, a very pretty sentence for an abstract.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| Silk does not burn in normal flame.
|
| If you are buying a _' silk'_ garment it is common to ask the
| shop-keeper to hold it to a cigarette lighter to prove it
| does not contain a synthetic petroleum-based fabric, such as
| polyester.
| gota wrote:
| I'm noy bothered by it but I wonder if it betrays some sort of
| religious belief from the authors? Which ideally should be
| either avoided or disclaimed explicitly
| NateEag wrote:
| Why does religious belief require a disclaimer?
|
| Do other philosophical positions, like atheism or
| panpsychism?
| OJFord wrote:
| If you want your writing to be taken as establishing facts,
| you need to base it on a priori established facts; if you
| base it on hypotheses and beliefs then you're just
| expanding on the hypothesis, contributing further belief.
|
| I suspect though that it's not the author's beliefs, just
| an ambiguously written way of saying that it was done by
| those people with that belief - in the same way that an
| atheist or follower of some other religion may say that
| Christians pray in order to communicate their wishes to
| God. Of course there is the rude and angry for no clear
| reason brand of atheist who could never bring themselves to
| say such a thing, but to the rest of us there is no problem
| in describing someone else's actions by their own reasons
| for doing them, even if we don't share that motivation. I
| have colleagues who run for pleasure; though I do not for
| mine.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| A Western academic would phrase it very differently. If you
| read the paper, they claim that a document called the "Jiatu
| Zhijia" describes a very similar object called a jiatu that
| supposedly resembles a divine turtle that caused legendary
| emperor Yao to abdicate to Shun, i.e. acting as a material
| carrier between heaven and earth.
|
| I can't actually find other English uses of that name, and
| while I can guess that they're referring to one of a small set
| of documents discussing the (possibly mythological) abdication
| of Yao, those documents were written thousands of years after
| the events. I'm not wholly opposed to the argument, but you
| should explicitly justify it in cases like this instead of
| accepting the symbolism uncritically.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| They talk about it later on:
|
| > Similarly, silk was also used as a sacrificial object, such
| as in the form of silk books or paintings on silk, with the
| silk serving as a carrier to convey the content of the
| calligraphy and painting upon it to Heaven.
|
| But it does seem that there is some context that would be
| helpful here, at least for this Western reader.
| hosh wrote:
| All the authors are Chinese. They might have been confirming a
| cultural transmission about the origins of using silk that
| otherwise had no direct archaeological evidence.
|
| They got a bit of the history of the Silk Roads incomplete. The
| Silk Roads, as it is understood now, isn't just about trading
| in silk, but the idea that the ancient world was connected and
| globalized through an extensive trade network. It isn't just
| overland routes, but also maritime routes for spice trade with
| India, and connections from North Africa deep into the interior
| of the African continent. Paper was worth more than silk along
| the Silk Roads. However, from the lens of Chinese history, silk
| was something that the Chinese monopolized for a while and was
| sought after by other cultures and civilizations connected
| through the Silk Roads.
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder how different African history would be if there were
| a major river emptying into the Indian Ocean instead of
| rather small ones. You have some minor rivers and the Red
| Sea. Not great for making a trading superpower like Egypt.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| You mean like the Ethiopian Empire?
| shagie wrote:
| One of the recent videos that I watched was RealLifeLore :
| How Africa's Geography Traps it in Endless Poverty
| https://youtu.be/Y8m95sCDEf0
|
| A chunk of it is about the nature of the lack of good
| harbors along the coast that would be able to shelter
| trading ships from the open ocean.
|
| Zanzibar is the noted example of a port
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanzibar#Before_1498
|
| > From the 9th century, Swahili merchants on Zanzibar
| operated as brokers for long-distance traders from both the
| hinterland and Indian Ocean world. Persian, Indian, and
| Arab traders frequented Zanzibar to acquire East African
| goods like gold, ivory, and ambergris and then shipped them
| overseas to Asia. Similarly, caravan traders from the
| African Great Lakes and Zambezian Region came to the coast
| to trade for imported goods, especially Indian cloth.
| Before the Portuguese arrival, the southern towns of Unguja
| Ukuu and Kizimkazi and the northern town of Tumbatu were
| the dominant centres of exchange.
|
| Even the large rivers that do empty into the ocean, they
| have significant portions of rapids that make it
| impractical to use as a trading route.
| powerapple wrote:
| Chinese burn paper items, such as paper money, when paying
| respects to their ancestors. We believe it will go to the other
| world.
|
| It is actually common in other cultures as well.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "Silk residues were successfully detected, which confirmed the
| early use of silk as a material carrier to communicate between
| Heaven and Earth"
|
| Love that the work was strong enough that they could slip a line
| like this into their abstract.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Shouldn't we call it the Silk Age then?
| masklinn wrote:
| Can't really make weapons out of silk.
| hinkley wrote:
| A lot of martial arts can teach you how to defend yourself
| with rope. You're not going to kill a mammoth or conquer
| Normandy with it but that's still a weapon.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > Can't really make weapons out of silk.
|
| Someone will always find a way, and then everyone will copy
| them
|
| source: every public internet thing ever
| olddustytrail wrote:
| A garrote
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| Great for assassins, but not terribly useful in a large
| battle.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Very true. Also not useful for space battles. Or
| rhinoceros training.
|
| Useful information.
| euroderf wrote:
| Idle question: If I am caught carrying one, what is my
| excuse ? What could it be besides a garrote ?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Being poetic about it, silk was effectively wielded as an
| economic weapon against the British empire to the point they
| retaliated with opium (flooding a foreign market with cheap
| drugs is surely an act of subterfuge if not war, so who's to
| say it has to have a pointy end to be a weapon?)
| Sabinus wrote:
| Reminds me of how the settled peoples of Europe, the Middle
| East and Asia eventually worked out the nomads would
| _definitely_ raid you if you didn 't make your settled-
| people-goods available for trade.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > silk was effectively wielded as an economic weapon
|
| Wasn't most of the silk used in Europe produced in Italy
| and France, though? Added together they weren't that far
| off from China (which also had a huge domestic market).
| India was also a major exporter so clearly Britain had the
| option to expand "domestic" production or buy more silk
| from Italy (importing from China was presumably just
| cheaper).
|
| European silk production collapsed in 1849 due to some
| still not well understood disease but that was quite some
| time after the first Opium War.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Are weapons the defining characteristic of civilizations?
| Really? What about fashion? Surely we are now in the
| Polyester Age.
| gavindean90 wrote:
| Boy are we lol
| SethMurphy wrote:
| The petroleum age would seem an even more encompassing
| description along the same theory.
| masklinn wrote:
| Weapons and tools is what the three-age system was defined
| by.
| ggm wrote:
| Is a shield a weapon? Is armour a weapon? Silk is resistant
| to cuts. People made suits of armour out of silk.
|
| Burning silk (and other organics) makes cyanide. I have no
| idea if this can be weaponised.
| OJFord wrote:
| You're surely trolling, you think shields and armour might
| be a weapon but you're not sure about cyanide?
| ggm wrote:
| The amount of cyanide affects its ability to be used as a
| weapon. Almonds have cyanide. They're a very ineffective
| weapon, unless you hurl a sack of them at an opponent
| like a mace maybe.
|
| Silk is a defensive weapon. Or, maybe silk cords power
| bows or Ballista?
| gpvos wrote:
| Interesting, but silk use in the bronze age is not a new
| discovery.
| dentemple wrote:
| My understanding is that it's not a well-known discovery, so
| that alone should make it interesting enough for discussion.
| gpvos wrote:
| Indeed, see the word that I started my comment with. But the
| point I am making was not referenced in the discussion.
|
| In fact, I think the main point of the linked article is
| actually not that silk was being used _at all_ in the bronze
| age by the Yangtze River civilization, but that the silk is
| being used _for sacrificial purposes,_ but the title on HN
| does not reflect that.
| contingencies wrote:
| Studied ancient Chinese history but not a silk expert, here's my
| 2c.
|
| Critical background is that silk takes a lot of labour to
| prepare. First you must have the right kind of insects (various
| species of moth in the larval stage are commonly known as
| "silkworm"), then you must have the right kind of trees to feed
| them (commonly mulberries), then you add a lot of labour for
| capture, harvesting, spinning, dyeing, weaving. In modern times I
| have only really seen it prepared commercial scale in Jiangsu
| province (near Xuzhou). If you head too far north the insects
| probably suffer from the cold, and if you head too far south any
| artificial farming monoculture is probably readily outcompeted by
| other flowering plants and predatory insects which are more
| suited to the tropics (on account of higher moisture, food
| availability and temperature).
|
| Relative to existing fabrics such as hemp, silk has at least in
| other contexts been of value militarily because of its relative
| strength to weight ratio and dense weave when applied to
| important tasks such as resisting arrows, although I'm uncertain
| if this use had emerged yet. Any military use would tend to
| reinforce a cultural link between life and death owing to its
| spatiotemporal proximity to mortality events.
|
| The fact that it is soft and labour-intensive (expensive / in
| short supply) means it was probably reserved for the wealthier or
| higher ranking figures.
|
| Although the paper doesn't state it clearly, it actually deals
| with the archaeological findings of a _non-Han Chinese_
| civilization in the area of Sichuan which was illiterate and was
| based around what appeared to be a bird and tree cult (the Shu
| kingdom of the Sichuan basin[1]). It is therefore possible that a
| kind of soft, reflective-refractive, feather-like, readily dyed
| textile with a fine weave may have contributed to some sort of
| ritual purpose in line with these beliefs. Later this
| civilization was destroyed by the Han Chinese.
|
| The wicking properties of silk are fair (I was unable to find a
| quantitative reference) as was the major early textile of hemp
| (which is also tough and therefore long-lasting) which is
| significant as we know that Sichuan in the Shu kingdom period was
| a vast, tropical inland basin criss-crossed by regularly flooding
| rivers descending from the Himalayas, thickly forested and with
| crocodiles, elephants, rhinos, giant cats, colourful birds, etc.
| Both silk and hemp textiles would help to cool anyone wearing
| them, relative to other options (animal skins, etc.).
| Furthermore, in the absence of modern medicine, fine-weave
| capable wicking fabrics would assist with resisting potentially
| lethal bacterial and fungal infections in the tropical
| environment and may therefore have been used as wound dressings
| or undergarments.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_(kingdom)
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Relative to existing fabrics such as hemp, silk has at least
| in other contexts been of value militarily because of its
| relative strength to weight ratio
|
| Silk's just easier in general. Unlike vegetable fibers, silk
| can be reeled to yarn/thread directly. With cotton (or wool),
| there are about 4-6 other processes before you can even get to
| spinning. Hemp's worse still, I think there's a retting process
| in there like with linen.
|
| Or perhaps, it's more true that the labor-intensive portions
| are up front... you're feeding the dumb little worms up to 4
| times a day early on, transferring them off of the eaten leaves
| (so as to avoid disease), and this only lightens up to twice a
| day later in the lifecycle. And this isn't tapping out a little
| pinch of food like for a goldfish bowl, they'll often do 10,000
| worms at a time just to have some modest quantity of fiber
| (perhaps enough for 5 or 6 yards of fabric). This ends up being
| like 60+ lbs of mulberry leaves there at the end.
|
| All told though, I'd much rather raise the worms than sit there
| for six months trying to card cotton by hand.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| A woman in my local spinning and weaving club took up silk
| worms as a hobby, spent about 6 months from beginning to end
| and wound up (lol) with a ~ square foot patch to hang on the
| wall. Pretty impressive conversion from tree leaves to silk
| when you think about it.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Me and my kids are still trying to figure out how to scale
| it up. We thought we had the right sort of mulberries...
| first batch starved. Then we tried Samia instead of Bombyx,
| but every single package would arrive damaged and empty.
| We've got mulberry seeds going, and we're getting some
| cuttings for this spring. Even then, you need something
| like 250+ cocoons for an ounce of silk, so we're not
| expecting much at first.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Wait, why are your packets of seed arriving empty all the
| time? Customs declaring them exotic and harmful? Mulberry
| mobsters? Moths in the delivery chain?
| Steven420 wrote:
| My guess would be that they came from Amazon
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Silkworm eggs, not seed. Got my refunds. No clue.
| Domestic, wasn't shipped from overseas or anything, and
| if it was customs they usually send something saying that
| they're confiscating the shipment (or so I'm led to
| believe, I don't often try to smuggle anything). It was a
| bit weird. They were pretty good about delivering the
| empty ripped envelopes though.
| est wrote:
| > a non-Han Chinese civilization in the area of Sichuan
|
| From TFA: Huang Di Yuan Concubine Leizu Xiling taught others to
| raise silkworms, and the legend Leizu is from the people of
| Chengdu in Sichuan
|
| Huang Di was regarded the ancester of every Han Chinese, and
| Sichuan was _the_ birth place of Han. The literal meaning of
| "Han" traces back to LiuBang, the Great King of Han, founder
| and first emperor of the Han dynasty, literally established his
| fief over Sichuan (Ba, Shu, Hanzhong and its 41 counties).
| Liubang spent his next 5 years elimilated all his enemies and
| began the first Pax Sinica of 300 years.
|
| If you mean the pre-Qin history of Sichuan, the Shu state was
| one of the "8 partners of Oath" that together with the Zhou
| state rebeled against the Shang, forming the foundation of
| Chinese civilization over its 800 years course.
|
| The Ba & Shu kingdom were conquered by Lord Hui-wen, the great-
| grandparent of Qin-Shi-Huang the first emperor of China. Do you
| call this a "civilization was destroyed by the Han Chinese" or
| am I missing something?
|
| So how do you define "non-Han"?
|
| Or you just like to spin a narrative here?
| unit149 wrote:
| Even early piratical man - ranging from the seafaring Athenians
| to Han Chinese - who developed extensive seafaring capabilities
| utilized these materials in peace and in war. Thus, the Chinese
| idiom "turning war into jade and silk" is a means of
| communication with the gates of heaven.
| superkuh wrote:
| Just for fun: any culture with silk could have made lighter-than-
| air hot-air balloons. And the way to prepare strong inorganic
| acid compounds was known then. Combined with metals like the tin
| in bronze it could produce hydrogen which could be trapped in
| oiled silk.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Seems like a huge waste of tin and silk.
| superkuh wrote:
| Manned silk hydrogen balloons as battlefield surveyors played
| a hugely important role in the american civil war. But yeah,
| it might be a bit much given the very remote sites of tin
| mining for most of the bronze age. Other metals like iron
| also work but are almost equally scarce at the time.
| OJFord wrote:
| It would have been quite extraordinary for transport at the
| time.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| I highly recommend the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou,
| which was the center of the imperial silk industry:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Silk_Museum
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170907005855/http://en.chinasi...
|
| It has complete royal robes ~1,000 years old, and a few damaged
| garments more than 2,000 years old IIRC.
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