One thing that goes unremarked is how extremely valuable fabric (a good freshly-woven "fine linen" would have been worth many week's wages of a laborer) was in Bible times--linen is labor-intensive to a degree unimaginable by modern experience. I have pointed this out several times. This shroud (in fact ALL fabrics prior to machine spinning and weaving) represents many man hours of labor in growing the flax, harvesting, spinning, retting, weaving, etc., all of which was hand labor. Until the industrial revolution (and even for many years afterwards), clothing and other cloth was a substantial part of any estate. The estate's linens and clothing was a primary topic in any Last Will and Testament.
I have never seen anyone mention exactly how long it would take a skilled weaver to produce this 14 foot long cloth (three over one twill) on a vertical hand loom. Perhaps you can shed some light on this topic.
Does the handloom require that the warp threads are mounted in their entire length or is there some mechanism that allows a smaller work area, with the rest of the thread stored on some kind of spindle? I assume that each weft thread has to be combed down onto the last weft thread with a hand comb of some kind. I've seen some pictures of Indian Handlooms. Do you have any photos of a handloom similar to the kind that might have been used in 1st Century Judea?
But I read no accounts of the thread. I'd also like to know if this garment is of whole cloth, or joined together by seams. That might be significant
From my study of the Shroud, there is only one "seam" on the Shroud as originally constituted. That "seam" for years was thought to attached the "side strip" to the main body of the Shroud. In 1978 X-Ray photography proved the "seam: to be merely a "pleat" with the Shroud linen folded over and carefully basted down. It is unknown when this was done. What is known is that the Shroud is one continuous piece of cloth.
X-Radiagraph of the "seam" connecting the "sidestrip" to the Shroud.
Photo borrowed from www.shroud.com
I have read that the yarn is hand spun with a "Z" twist. According to shroudie's ShroudStory website:
More significant is the fact that the yarn was bleached before the cloth was woven. This is not how linen was produced in Europe during the time in question. There and then, the entire linen was bleached after weaving. More ancient linen was manufactured as described by Pliny the Elder: individual hanks of yarn were bleached and dried before weaving. This produced batches of thread with slightly different off-white coloration. With lighting from behind, X-ray-transmission, ultraviolet light and contrast-enhanced photography we can see discrete bands of yarn with different visual characteristics (x-ray densities and corresponding color densities). Some areas show darker warp yarns and some show darker weft yarns. In places bands of darker or lighter color cross producing plaid effect. Archeologically speaking, the cloth of the Shroud was not produced when the carbon 14 testing determined that it was.
I hope this information helps.
re: (((Posted by Swordmaker to Mamzelle .... I have never seen anyone mention exactly how long it would take a skilled weaver to produce this 14 foot long cloth (three over one twill) on a vertical hand loom. Perhaps you can shed some light on this topic. )))
I may have missed it, but how wide is the fabric?
That's quite a length of fabric (I didn't realize it was that long--). It would involve a substantial warping which would likely take a skilled weaver, working on what would look to modern weavers like a tapestry loom, a few days work. 1st cent weavers would be able to contrive a winding mechnism for the warp feed--but I'd put a small point in the "modern" side of the debate because it is so long Weaving itself, with a simple twill (makes a satiny "hand" and a nice drape), only a few days more. I'd say, rough ballpark, 3-4 weeks of concentrated effort by one weaver. Weaving does not take as much time as fiber prep and spinning--.
Flax , which goes through many stages of prep, takes many months of labor. You can spin animal hair right off the animal! Spinning that much linen thread--and I'd like to know thread count?--would take the work of many weeks.
Materials were more valuable than labor in this time--so the fiber was relatively expensive.
A single thread would tell whether it was the high-quality part of the flax plant (the long fiber) or the cheaper tow. You can spin long fiber much finer than tow.
Pleat? Pleats are sometimes made to repair/darn. Whole cloth is far more valuable, and significant, than seamed cloth. If you wanted to honor the dead, and if you had financial resources, you'd choose a beautiful, single length of pure white linen to drape the body. A rich man provided Jesus with the tomb--he might also have provided him with a fine garment. If the pleat is along a warp thread, that thread might have been pulled or damaged (like you pull yarn from a sweater) by accident, and someone made a repair. I might also call this a "tuck"...
Remember the garment that the Roman soldiers gambled over--"without seam"--this is accomplished with a process called double weave, where you can actually weave in two layers. A double-weave does leave a clue, if this happened to be a double-woven piece of cloth--you can't avoid some awkwardness in the fold. Double-weaving is also done by a weaver to make a narrow loom do the work of one twice as wide.
re(((More significant is the fact that the yarn was bleached before the cloth was woven. This is not how linen was produced in Europe during the time in question.)))
I dunno about this assertion--linen production was a household affair, not industrial, and the individual household would have bleached when it saw fit. Flax is bleached in the sun--I think the finished thread would also have been bleached (if I had spun yarn I wanted to be as white as possible, I would hang it out to sun), then also the finished fiber. White is a hard "color" to achieve. The sun will damage silk, wool and cotton--but linen is very strong.
Just from the photo, and going on very limited look--this appears hand-spun. That doesn't mean it's first-century, but that it was not spun on a wheel. That's at least a point in the favor of 1st-cent.