Fragment with Bearded Face

This fragment consists of a head and the upper part of the throat. The head is completely frontal, with wide eyes focusing on the beholder. It is the head of a man with short hair and a pointed beard; both hair and beard are rendered in blue wool speckled with beige threads to connote age. Two straight red lines indicating the nose, along with the red horizontal line above the moustache continue horizontally between the gray eyebrows and the eyes to the inner red outline of the face. The mouth is woven as only a short red horizontal line. Beige loops were evenly covering face and throat. On the proper left side of the face, where they are more intact, it can be observed that no extra color was used to indicate the cheeks.

The outline of the fragment fits so exactly to those of head and throat that one has to suppose that the motif was cut deliberately out of its original context.

Although only a very small section of the original textile has survived, we can propose that it once belonged to a so-called register hanging. The name for this type of hanging derives from the horizontal levels on which their figures and scenes appear—exclusively in strict frontality and in the technique also seen here. A typical and nearly complete example is the so-called Elijah hanging in the Abegg-Stiftung in Riggisberg, Switzerland.Riggisberg, Abegg-Stiftung, inv. 2439 and 2638: S. Schrenk, Textilien des Mittelmeerraumes aus spätantiker bis frühislamischer Zeit (Riggisberg, 2004), 47–50, no. 7. The style of the figures and the composition of the whole hanging with its horizontal registers (levels) clearly distinguishes these weft-loop weavings from others, such as, for example, the Dumbarton Oaks fragments BZ.1953.2.100 and BZ.1953.2.101a–b, which belong to another (not yet clearly described) type. Also symptomatic is the reduced palette of strong colors used for the faces, which stands in contrast to the two other Dumbarton Oaks fragments.

Some fragments of register hangings have been radiocarbon dated, suggesting the whole group can be dated between the fourth and sixth centuries.The earliest radiocarbon date, however, is 246 CE, for a fragment in Riggisberg, Abegg-Stiftung, inv. 8 c, 1–3: S. Schrenk, Textilien des Mittelmeerraumes, 53, no. 9 (radiocarbon dated 246–452 CE). The latest is 614 CE: Abegg-Stiftung, inv. 4308: ibid., 55, no. 10 (radiocarbon dated 425–614 CE). The workshops must have been in Egypt, as a fragment in Stuttgart shows inscriptions with Coptic letters, including the word or title “Apa” for saints, which seems to have been used particularly in monastic Egypt.Stuttgart, Landesmuseum Württemberg, inv. 1984-103: S. Schrenk, “Der Elias-Behang in der Abegg-Stiftung,” in Begegnung von Heidentum und Christentum im spätantiken Ägypten, ed. D. Willers (Riggisberg, 1993), 167–81, and Schrenk, Textilien des Mittelmeerraumes, 50n150. The approximate date and localization attributed to the register hangings can be applied to the fragment here. Some of these hangings show an ambitious, theological program and could well have been used in churches. The use of the fragment here, of course, cannot be determined because of its small size.

—Sabine Schrenk, March 2020

Washington, DC, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Woven Interiors: Furnishing Early Medieval Egypt, August 31, 2019—January 5, 2020.