Looms and the counting of looms

This lesson asks you to analyse why key technological developments, among them the loom, matter to the fashion industry. The museum holds no history of how the loom was invented; it offers looms as state workshops, prices and counts in Egypt and Anatolia, and your class adds the other machines and materials. ¹

Look at what the numbers measure and what they leave out: the count of looms, the price of a loom, who owns the workshop. Then ask where each number comes from.

Put the numbers side by side and ask what each one counts. The tiraz record says that at Tinnis in Egypt some 5,000 looms were working, among them a workshop belonging to the caliph, and that a governor under al-Muqtadir had eighty tiraz workshops of his own. ² The record on the Ottoman weaver says that Tokat had the largest group in the middle of the fifteenth century, 306 weavers, and that Manisa had 3,000 looms in the nineteenth century and 1,050 in the early Republic. ³ It also gives the 1640 price list: an Edirne loom 170 akce, a plain loom 120. ³ In some eastern places the loom pit was taxed, and the Mardin law's 24 akce per loom pit was later given up. ³

Each number comes from a single encyclopaedia article. The Tinnis and governor figures come from the TDV article on tiraz by Nebi Bozkurt, which gives some 5,000 looms and no date for them. ² The Manisa and Tokat counts and the 1640 prices come from the TDV entry on the cullah by Feridun Emecen. ³ The record on the weaver notes that the entry gives no wages and names no individual weaver, that it covers the Ottoman weaver only, and that the tiraz workshops of Egypt, Iraq and Iran are not yet written there. ³ These records give counts and prices, not wages.

The tiraz record says the head of the houses oversaw the dyers, the tools and the weavers, saw to their pay and their equipment and supervised their work. ⁴ The weaver record says looms were made by the weavers, ordered or bought ready, ³ and that the weavers often worked to orders from the cloth merchants and became dependent on them. ³ Which arrangement gave the weaver more say over his own work, what in the two records tells you so, and what would you need to know before deciding, given that the entry gives no wages?

• Tiraz: the counts of looms and workshops, and the head of the houses who oversaw them.
• Weaver: the counts of looms, the 1640 prices and the guild of the weavers.

Read the record on the weaver. Make a table of every number about looms with its source.