Technology doesn’t necessarily improve everything. The woman to our left is wearing a diaphanous linen dress woven over 3500 years ago. How many weavers could craft something so magnificently fine today?  Could any modern loom do it?  Probably not. I was watching a documentary on the military channel the other evening about the forging of a Katana, the sword of the Japanese Samurai.  The documentary talked about how no living craftsman, with the help of all the modern technology available could create anything at once so strong and sharp today.  That reminded me of some reading I’d done earlier in The Book of Looms by Eric Broudy.
Using primitive horizontal ground looms the Egyptians could weave fabric through which your limbs could be seen.  Wrappings on Egyptian mummies sometimes contained as many as 540 warp threads to the inch; something he says has never been duplicated.  The figure that blew my mind however was 250 miles: the distance weavers in ancient India could spin out one pound of cotton…of course rugs or carpets this sheer might be a bit cold underfoot.

Textile colors too have suffered a diminution in quality. The weave of Navajo rugs, for instance, is still of excellent quality but the colors are not what they were when the weaver had to fashion them out of nature.  Today they are bright and clean but the subtle shades that once characterized them are gone, victims of the onrush of dyes formed in huge vats.