2-740-733 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Silk Decorative Tunic Band with a Hunter, 700s. This prestigious silk band displays a stylized palmette leaf above a hunter who holds a sword and a shield and pursues a lion (see photo) and a rabbit. Another fragment with Arabic script indicates Islamic manufacture. Photo of: Detail of the Lion's Head, Silk Decorative Band with a Hunter (1939.505) Green and ivory silk horizontal wefts dominate, interlaced by vertical warps in a diagonal twill weave. A second inner warp does not come to the surface. Such compound structures were woven on large looms with automatic pattern repetition, called drawlooms.