The nimble fingers which molded clay had from earliest times a parallel task in the entangling of vegetable or animal fibers so as to make some things serviceable to man. It is probable that baskets, mats, and even ropes were made by Paleolithic man at an earlier stage than textile fabrics, which require the use of a twisted or spun thread and the criss-cross weaving pattern of weft and warp: this, however, is conjecture. Our earliest specimens, which are Egyptian and from the early part of the fifth millennium B.C., include mats, coiled basketry, and primitive fabrics; the earliest examples of rope in Egypt occur a few centuries later.

Except for the fact that ropes at the present day are sometimes manufactured from man-made fibers for the sake of durability, it is true to say that basketry, matting, and ropes have a continuous history of at least 7,000 years in which some of the materials, main techniques, and even patterns have shown no change. A specimen of coiled basketry from about the year 3400 B.C. illustrates both a method of fabrication, that of sewing the coil in shape from the base upwards, and a form of decoration, with vertical colored stitches passing over two coils, which are still in vogue. The same is true of the use of plaited material for baskets, the making of rush mats, and the more complicated basketry built up on a frame of stakes. The making of ropes, on which sea transport and large-scale building operations depended, was not a domestic art, but may be included here because the process is one of spinning. Reed, leather, palm fiber, and esparto were among the materials anciently used. Normally, there were three distinct processes involved--twisting the fibers into yarn, the yarn into strands, and finally the strands into rope; in order to prevent the completed rope from untwisting itself, the strands are twisted internally in the opposite direction from that in which they are twisted together. In an Egyptian rope-walk, two men respectively twisted the strands and closed them as they walked with the rope held between them, while a third man in the middle. packed it tight with a marlinspike.

Reeds, rushes, sedges, and grasses were all used in ancient basketry, but the principal textile material of the ancient Near East was flax, which was grown also for its oil-containing seed and was well established by 3000 B.C. To prepare it for use, the fibers had to be separated from the rest of the stem by soaking it to loosen the structure before scraping and combing. Hemp was the first fiber-plant of the Chinese and was known in eastern Europe by 500 B.C., but its main use in Europe has been for rope. Cotton, though it may have been derived originally from Arabia, appears first in India, and silk in the Far East. Wool was thought unclean by the Egyptians, and, although there was much woolen cloth made in Mesopotamia and northern Syria, the earliest considerable remains are from Scandinavia about 1000 B.C. The colder climate doubtless stimulated demand for it in Europe.

In order to make a usable thread, fibers from any natural material have to be drawn out parallel and twisted together so as to form one continuous narrow thread. This process, which we call spinning, will first have been done experimentally by rubbing between the palms of the hands, then between one hand and the cheek or leg, leaving the other hand free to control the bundle of tangled fibers: the spun thread was then wound on a stick. The use of the stick, which was intended originally simply to avoid entanglement, developed into the use of a spindle of wood or other material, which was twirled to spin the thread. The spindle, which until the fifteenth century A.D. was virtually the only mechanical aid to spinning, might be kept in rotation by the human hand; but usually it was suspended with a weight on it, the whorl, which would keep it turning for some time like a top. The action of the spindle produced a more uniform thread than the unaided hand, but it was nevertheless common in early times to double the thread for increased strength before it was used for weaving. Another, less important, implement was the distaff, a larger stick used to hold the fibres ready for spinning. That spinning was normally work done by women is shown, not only by early illustrations, but by the continuing use of 'spinster' for unmarried women and 'distaff side' for the female branch of a family. . .