Silk
Claudia Colini, Uta Lauer
Silk is an elastic protein fibre produced by certain insects, the most common of them being the mulberry silkworm, the larvae of the domestic silk moth (Bombyx mori). The fibre is collected by unrolling the insects' cocoons, and the filaments are then weaved to produce textiles that are light, white in colour and durable.
Silk was used in China at least since the 3rd millennium BCE (Tsien 2004), although fibroin, one of silk proteins, has been identified through the proteomic analysis of soil samples collected from three tombs at the site of Jiahu, China (c.8500 BCE), suggesting that techniques of collecting and weaving silk were already known in the Neolithic Age (Gong et al. 2016). The use of silk as a writing surface, however, is attested only since the 6th or 7th century BCE, in the form of single sheets, scrolls and concertinas. The characteristics of silk, including the good absorbency of fluids, made it an appreciated writing material. Its use as a writing support declined, although it never completely disappeared, only between the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, a few centuries after the introduction of paper, possibly due to silk being more expensive than paper (Tsien 2004). Silk was used as a writing surface in China throughout imperial times (–1911) for especially precious or prestigious writing. This beautiful textile, especially when decorated, was also employed in the production of manuscripts as one of the materials used for protective bands, pouches and bags, as well as for the covers of precious books in both Asian, Middle-East, African and European manuscript cultures.
Relevant analytic methods include:
- Microscopy for the identification of fibres,
- FTIR and chemometric methods for the identification of fibres and the assessment of the degradation (Badillo-Sanchez et al. 2019; de Palaminy et al. 2022),
- C14 for dating