a review by Genevieve Chornenki.
Silk, that strong, luxury fibre that adds shimmer and elegance to knitting yarn! While admiring it online or in your local yarn store, have you ever considered its past? If not, put your needles down and your feet up. Open the pages of The World History of Silk by Aaarathi Prasad and prepare to be enlightened.
Silk comes from the protein that has been separated from the gummy glue that holds a moth’s pupa or cocoon together. In most situations the moth that is forming inside is not allowed to emerge but is stifled (read killed) by heat or chemical means so that an unbroken fibre can be wound. If the moth emerges, as it is allowed to do in some cultures or circumstances, the silk will be broken or interrupted.
Silk comes from a variety of creatures and several different moths. (See image of four different silk moths.) In the winter of 1935–36, Chanhu-daro, an Indus civilization site now in Sindh, Pakistan, was excavated. Tiny steatite beads were uncovered, strung on forty or fifty strands of silk that had been twisted together sometime between 2450 and 2000 BCE. The silk did not come from mulberry silkworms that are the source of most of today’s silk, but from the cocoons of the wild Saturniidae family of moths.
As for commercial silk worms, Bombyx mori, farmers south of China’s Yellow River were already domesticating them in Neolithic times, and ornamental silkworms cast in gilt bronze or carved in jade have been recovered from graves. An exceptional one was carved from a ten-millimeter sliver of the tusk of a wild boar.
Most of the local makers around the world who collected or cultivated silk and employed dying, spinning or weaving technologies will forever remain anonymous (just as those working with wool, flax, cotton and other fibres). Even so, Prasad introduces readers to people—botanists, illustrators, and merchants—that few of us would recognize. Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), for instance, produced engraved and etched plates of flowers and moths based on years of observation, detailed studies, and time-consuming breeding. It was she who first noted that a moth’s wings form even while the creature is in the larval stage.
Prasad has a PhD in molecular genetics from Imperial College London and later trained in bioarcheology. She never shies from the distasteful aspects of silk production, but her affection for the creatures that yield silk makes for gentle and relaxing reading.
