Tissus coptes

Quelques informations sur les tissus coptes:

L'utilisation des tissus

Textiles   had various uses in Coptic Egypt. The household uses of textiles included bed   sheets and covers, towels, napkins, tablecloths, and carrying sacks. Textiles   were used both in households and in public and church buildings as decorative   curtains and hangings.
The   most common use of textiles was as apparel. The standard form of clothing in   Coptic Egypt during Roman times was the tunic, a rectangular shirt-like piece   of cloth that fit over the head, and was sometimes fastened at the waist by   a belt. Textiles were also used for belts, cloaks, and shawls as well as for   burial garments. When mummification was outlawed in the fourth century, the   Copts stopped wrapping the bodies with linen strips and began using regular   clothing in which to bury the dead. Other textiles such as shawls, bed covers,   and curtains were probably used as external wrappings of the dead.

Un indicateur social

For   both the pharaonic Egyptians and the Greeks, clothing was indicative of social   and economic status. Clothing continued to distinguish between social strata   for the Romans. The Roman citizens wore togas and non-citizens wore tunics.   For the Copts, tunics were made of plain wool or linen and were decorated with   either a single vertical band (clavus) that ran down the center of the garment,   or two decorated vertical bands (clavi) that extended over each shoulder down   to the knee area or the bottom of the garment, on the front and back. The clavi   were decorated and were generally purple. Tunic decorations derived from the   army's use of decorations to designate rank during the Roman era.

During   the Byzantine period, the tunic evolved into a variation called the dalmatic*.   The dalmatic was wider and longer and was decorated with round ornaments (roundels)   on the sleeves or at the knees, sleeve bands, and neck bands, as well as the   clavi. The Byzantines made new regulations to restrict the use of the more luxurious   items of silk, purple dye, and gold thread to the imperial classes. The lower   classes made imitations on the use of imperial styles, like dyeing red over   blue to make an imitation purple. The Copts sometimes removed the colored ornaments   from the old and worn-out clothes to reuse them on new clothes.

*La dalmatique,   qui signifie blouse en laine de Dalmatie, est un vêtement de choeur, un vêtement liturgique. 

Source : http://research.calacademy.org/research/anthropology/coptic/Coptweav.htm

Maude