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miracle.
    The Chinese zealously guarded the source of silk and its production for many centuries. They didn’t even start exporting silk until more than two millennia after they first discovered it. But, in around 140 bc , the secret of silk-making spread to India as an inevitable result of the thriving trade in silk between that country and China. Yet more than six centuries passed before the mystery of silk production finally reached Europe, which had believed for many centuries that silk thread was simply picked from certain trees native to China.
    In ad 550 , two Persian monks who had lived as missionaries in China related the truth about the origins of silk to the Byzan-tine emperor Justinian I. A man who was used to being obeyed, Justinian ordered the monks to return to China and smuggle silkworm eggs to Constantinople. He also promised them a hefty financial reward if they were successful. The monks, now pretending to be missionaries when they were in fact engaged on the emperor’s mission, trekked back to China and did his bidding, concealing thousands of silkworm eggs in the hollows of their bamboo canes.
    Silkworm eggs enter a state of suspended animation when kept in the cold and dark. Once the eggs reached Constantinople, they were placed on top of a pile of warm manure and in 8
    A better mousetrap
    the sunshine. In these favourable conditions the eggs soon hatched. The emerging larvae were fed on leaves of the wild mulberry that grew abundantly in and around the city. The hardy silkworms resulting from this cunning act of industrial espionage gave birth to the European silk-making industry.
    Homo sapiens is believed to have first evolved about 200 000 years ago. For almost all of this time, the new species clothed itself in skins and furs torn from the bodies of animals that had been slaughtered for food. The production of fabric began, by comparison, far more recently, at about the same time as recorded history.
    This is no coincidence: the writing of history and fabric-making both require a considerable sophistication of civilization.
    The first plant used for cloth was flax, still employed extensively today to make linen. The earliest surviving fragments of linen are found in Egypt. They were made there in about 4500 bc .
    The production of linen depended on a major new invention: weaving.
    Weaving is the interlacing of two or more sets of strands of fibre at right angles to each other to form a useful material. It’s a simple process when rigid fibres such as reeds are being used. In this case, as anyone who has done raffia work will know, the weaving can easily be undertaken manually. But rigid fibres don’t make comfortable clothing: this needs to be produced from soft, flexible yarns and can only be woven in a neat and convenient way by making use of a loom.
    A loom is designed to hold a set of parallel threads laid out flat —known as the warp—so that they do not tangle. The loom must also facilitate the weaving process by allowing another set of threads—the weft—to be interlaced with this warp. Most looms only have a few basic parts. Usually one end of the warp is tied to a warp beam (also known as the back beam or warp bar) while the other end is fastened to the cloth beam (also known as the front beam) on which the finished fabric can be rolled.
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    This kind of hand-loom is well-suited to weaving plain, undecorated fabric, but it cannot weave more ambitious kinds of fabrics that contain large, complex patterns or—most ambitious of all — images . These are known as decorated fabrics and can only be woven by a loom that allows the raising and lowering of individual warp threads to permit the different coloured weft threads to be inserted by the shuttle in such a way that a design can be created in the fabric.
    The first loom that made it possible to create a pattern in fabric was called a drawloom because the loom allowed the warp threads to be drawn up individually to