Knitting today and had a thought- who came up with it, and when?
Obviously, there was spinning and weaving a very long time ago, but knitting and crochet must be more modern.
Wiki says knitting originated in Egypt in around 1100-1400 CE. Which suggests a big window, and that no-one has really been bothered to do the research. Also- Egypt suggests cotton or linen as the first knitted materials, rather than wool, which seems odd.
It seems to me that if every detail is known about farming and animal husbandry, surely someone should know what was done with the products?
Whoever came up with knitting (whether needles or board) she must had had a very interesting mind to work it out.
Why would knitting necessarily be more modern than weaving (I’ll give you spinning though)? If anything, I would guess that knitting predates weaving, the equipment needed is a lot less high tech.
Probably not. For one thing, there are no myths which mention knitting, while there are lots which mention weaving. Not solid evidence, to be sure, but suggestive that knitting was either more recent or so ubiquitous as to be not worth a mention - but if the latter were the case, we’d expect to see more fragments of knitted objects, along with woven ones.
For another, there seems to be no ancient word for it. “To knit” first appears in English around 1400! Evidence seems to point to knitting being in existence in the Middle East, and perhaps Spain, earlier than that, but not by a whole lot, in the scheme of fabricworks.
There is an earlier technique called nalbinding, which uses one needle instead of two, and is often confused with knitting, even by archeologists. True knitted artifacts don’t begin until about 1000 C.E. - Common Era, not even before the time of Christ.
The late 1200’s are where knitting becomes more common - not just knitted artifacts, but portrayals of knitting in art and mentions in song. It wasn’t until the 1600’s though, that we find people knitting with wool!
A really neat history of knitting- much speculation here, but educated speculation.
Wasn’t that lady in Tale of Two Cities knitting? Madam Defarge IIRC??? something like that. It was actually a coded document recording the crimes of the Nobility. That was written mid 1800’s. Her coded knitting was later used at trials for the Guillotine.
i thought madame defarge’s knitting was purely symbolic. i know the knitters would informally count the number of heads that come out (during sydney carton’s execution.)
It’s been thirty years since I read Tale of Two Cities. The main memory was that lady knitting, knitting all the time. It gave me the creeps when I read it.
I thought there was a code in her knitting. But, that may be my bad memory. I need to reread Dickens someday.
Anyway, it’s one of the few books I recall that features a character knitting.
Why does it suggest cotton or linen? We know that Egyptians farmed, and still farm, sheep, goats and camels for their hair. We have references to people in the Bible to people in Israel, right next door, making woolen garments 3, 000 years ago right through to the time of the Roman occupation.
So how does an origin in Egypt 900 years ago suggest linen rather than wool?
i find it incredible that a people (europeans) who live in a cold place, with plentiful sheep, will have to wait more than 1000 years before knitting is invented in the middle east and exported to them via romans/moors.
An awful lot depends on definition: Is knitting something with two needles like today; something with one needle like crotchet; something that makes loops like nalbinding?
Reading a book on knitting translated from English, I encountered the usual “knitted fabric found in Egyptian tombs, so it’s thousands of years old”, which is also told on the English Wikipedia site; but the German wikipedia site starts knitting in the 13th century when the Moslems brought steel needles into Spain. Apparently the first uses the definition of “fabric made with loops” (Similar to fisher nets) while the second uses the definition of “two needles”.
Because they did other forms similar in the end product, likecrocheting and nalbinding.
But then, a lot of techniques do take time to develop: for centuries, most people wore “skirts and dresses” (kilts, togas, cloaks) woven in one broad piece instead of trousers, because sewing trousers was so complicated and difficult that only a special group of people got them, although a cloak or toga is much more draughty in a cold climate than a good woolen trouser.
Remember also that a lot of technical things, starting with simple things like the wheel all the way up to more complicated ones, did spread out from one region instead of being developed independently in several places. It’s much much easier to reverse-engineer or improve something you already have an idea of than invent something completely out of the blue.
