Who said knitting started with twisted stitches and hooked needles?

27 February 201822 November 2021 stringbed4 Comments

Several previous posts refer to generally held beliefs about the earliest knitters in Egypt using needles with hooked tips to make twisted-stitch stockinette fabric. More recent scientific examination of archaeologically recovered knitted fabric has radiocarbon dated the oldest known specimen of true knitting to the interval 425–594 CE. Counter to what the established tenet leads us to expect, this has an open-loop structure. Additional knitted objects through to the early 2nd millennium CE, found (but not necessarily made) in Egypt, have undergone similar examination and images in the published reports suggest that the open-knit form was by far the predominant one.

The questioned notion about the developmental sequence was fostered by Fritz Iklé in an article titled Über das Stricken (About Knitting), published in 1936 in the Schweizerische Arbeitslehrerinnen-Zeitung (Swiss Trade Teachers Journal, vol. 19, no. 8). He discusses the earlier conflation of looped fabric with a cross-knit structure made with a single eyed needle, now generally regarded as a form of nalbinding, and true knitting. However, he characterizes the earliest knitted material as having a twisted-loop structure. The article includes a section on knitting with hook-tipped needles and he draws the conclusion that the use of such tools to produce twisted-knit stockinette was “apparently the form of knitting that preceded our customary knitting.”

Iklé then discusses later regional schools of knitting that employ hooked needles, noting that they are also used for open-knit stockinette. He illustrates this with a photograph of an unfinished sock.

“The beginning of knitted work from Turkey shows us that hooked needles can also be used to knit open stitches, for which we also have evidence from Arabic graves from the 9th to the 12th centuries…”

Iklé cites the work of Luise Schinnerer during the 1890s (discussed in detail in the following post), who was the immediate source for several of the ideas that he propagated. Their conclusions would less likely have been reflected in the English-language literature if Mary Thomas had not picked up on Iklé’s article in the preparation of Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book, from 1938. She explicitly credits him as one her informants and appears to have paraphrased the caption of the preceding photograph but misread a pivotal detail in the original German.

“…a half-finished sock of the 12th century found in a Turkish tomb reveals that the knitter was then working with five hooked needles…”

Either way, Thomas does not identify the Turkish tomb to which she is referring or substantiate her statement in any other manner. It should also be noted that if the Turkish sock illustrated by Iklé were indeed from the 12th century, despite his saying nothing about its age, its ribbing would provide incontrovertible evidence of knitting and purling side-by-side at a significantly earlier date than can otherwise be attested. Finding needles in place in work of that age would also be quite sensational.

Thomas bases what is now an entrenched dichotomy between “Eastern” and “Western” knitting on the assumption that fabric produced in the corresponding areas of Europe can be characterized by preferential knitting with twisted or open loops. Although the geographic labels are of mnemonic utility when discussing craft practice (for a right-handed knitter, loops with an Eastern mount face to the east and those with a Western mount to the west) the derivation of her nomenclature is gainsaid by the open-knit Turkish sock.

Thomas discusses and illustrates another regional form of knitting with hooked needles practiced in Landes, on the Atlantic coast of southern France. This is also mentioned briefly by Iklé with details that Thomas includes in her own description. She says that “the fabric is Crossed Stocking Stitch, knitted in the Eastern way” again contradicting the geographic basis for her classification of stitch structures. She resolves this by permitting both the Eastern and Western forms to be “crossed” or “uncrossed,” further treating knitted and purled stitches as separate constructs. Although again useful in knitting pedagogy, that model occludes rather than clarifies historical and structural relationships between the various forms, as well as the differentiation of the techniques used for their production.

Whatever the extent of Thomas’s reliance on Iklé may have been, he provided her with at least one item that is not described in his own text — a knitted fragment in his collection.

Thomas calls it a “magnificent example of Arabian color knitting of the 7th to 9th centuries…found in Fostat…and knitted in Crossed Stocking Stitch (Eastern)….” This dating is consistent with Iklé’s general appraisal of such material. Thomas notes that the decoration was knitted upside-down and that she aligned the photo with the direction of the stitching. This apparently assumes that the cuff-down working of the Turkish sock was normative for early knitting, rather than taking the orientation of the pattern to indicate what, in reference to socks, would be toe up.

When inverted, the pattern can be compared directly with the appreciable amount of decorated Islamic knitting from the Fatamid Period (969-1171 CE) for which descriptions have since been published. Several commentators have suggested on this basis that the Iklé fragment is also correctly dated to that period. The current location of the fragment is unknown (if it still exists) and its age cannot be determined more precisely. (Nor can the assertion that it has a twisted-stitch structure be confirmed; the photo does not display that level of detail.) For as long as it was considered illustrative of the earliest form of true knitting, the photograph in Thomas’s book was regarded as particularly valuable documentation.

One of the more rigorous recent discussions of Egyptian textiles is found in a presentation of selected objects from the Katoen Natie collection in Antwerp, written by Antoine De Moor, Chris Verhecken-Lammens, and André Verhecken, titled 3500 Years of Textile Art, and published in 2008. This includes photographs of a knitted stocking and fragments of three others that were all radiocarbon dated to the Fatamid period. The four photos are detailed enough to show open-knit structures, as can be seen in the full stocking here. The decorative pattern of one of the fragments closely resembles that of the Iklé fragment and a close-up detail shows its stitch structure with particular clarity (here in a detail of the detail).

This corroborates Iklé’s report of open-loop knitting being evidenced by material found in Arabic graves from the 9th to the 12th centuries, even if he estimated an earlier date for the fragment from his own collection. It seems likely that he based that assessment on the presumption that twisted-loop knitting was the older practice. However, the bulk of evidence now available does not support either the chronology or distribution statistics he described and Thomas then injected into the mainstream craft literature.

Looped Fabric

Hook-tipped knitting needles and their traveling companions

17 February 20185 February 2023 stringbedLeave a comment

The preceding post discussed hook-tipped knitting needles and the reasons why they are thought to be older than smooth-tipped ones. The schools of knitting in which they are used are further characterized by a method of holding the yarn that is generically termed “yarn around neck.” This is believed to resemble the form of knitting initially transmitted from Islamic Egypt more closely than any other. An early description of it appears below and its most extensively documented form is now widely known as Portuguese knitting.

The only structural detail that might differentiate fabric knitted around the neck from that produced by other methods is too subtle to be measured, much less recognized in older material. The physical evidence that specifically indicates the method is an ancillary mechanical device used in a limited number of schools and unlikely to be recognized as such in an inventory of archaeologically recovered artifacts. (This is the chest ring in the description below and seen in the video linked to above)

Nonetheless, the geographic distribution of yarn-around-neck knitting coincides well enough with that of hooked needles for it to be likely that the tool and method accompanied each other along whatever transmission paths they may have traversed. (Twisted stitches are often regarded as an additional fellow traveler but they are readily made by other methods of knitting and are specific to none. Their occurrence is not geographically bounded, notwithstanding the popular designation “Eastern knitting” which I’ll discuss in the next post.)

I examined early texts about hooked knitting needles in two previous posts regarding the precursors of Tunisian crochet and am now going to revisit the source documents with specific focus on knitting.

In brief review, the first written description of hooked needles in hand knitting that I’ve so far managed to locate is of their introduction in Hannover, Germany, in 1787 (source reference and translation here). This is corroborated in a more detailed text from 1800 by J. F. Netto and F. L. Lehmann (whose book on knitting is detailed here). This associates it specifically with knitting in the round using five needles, with a separate section describing how a named Swiss knitter worked flat with two needles using a fixed-needle technique (translated and explained via the preceding link). This description overlaps almost entirely with that of Portuguese knitting, which traditionally uses a shoulder ring and hook-tipped needles, although smooth-tipped needles are also commonly employed.

Fourteenth Chapter

Knitting purses … with needles and hooks

§34

“Dübois knit the purse with heavy knitting needles into the one end of which a space had been filed forming a small hook like a tambour needle. He had a ball of silk thread in his vest pocket. On the left side of his chest there was a horn ring with a hook attached, through which the working thread passed. The hooked needle was thus used to pull a new loop through the previous one more quickly than usual. He kept the thread under light pressure with his left arm. The thread passing through the ring was therefore under slight tension, largely accounting for, first, the rapidity of his knitting, and second the beauty and evenness of his stitches.”

Recent texts that discuss differences in the working properties of knitting needles with smooth and hooked tips generally conclude that nothing can be done with the one that cannot be done with the other, but that hooked tips can do certain things more efficiently. One example of this is the economy of motion and material resulting from the ability of a hook to pull a new loop through a preexisting stitch without first wrapping the yarn around the needle.

A further difference is not immediately apparent when the comparison is made from the perspective of mainstream contemporary knitting. An unworked stitch can be slipped from one hooked needle to the other and knitted with the receiving needle alone by pulling a loop through it crochet style. In any case, it has the advantage Netto lists in the section on flat knitting that “stitches will not as easily be dropped or slip off in the process.”

Yarn-around-neck knitting also has an important property that lacks counterpart in any other method. It leads the yarn to the front of the work, making the purl stitch simpler to form than the knit one. Fabric now produced in this manner is ordinarily held with the purl side facing the knitter. Tubular knitting intended to show ordinary stocking stitch on the public side is worked inside out and the finished item then re-inverted.

There is no way to trace that practice back to its origin. Nonetheless, if yarn-around-neck knitting is accepted as an attribute of Coptic tubular knitting, or even if the trail begins with knitting in the form initially carried into Islamic Europe, purling would be far older than is currently believed.

Looped Fabric

Early knitting with hook-tipped needles

9 February 201822 November 2021 stringbed1 Comment

Texts about knitting often present needles with hooked tips as limited regional preferences to the commonplace smooth-tipped needles. The hooked form is considered to be the older of the two and initially used in Egypt where the craft is also believed to have originated. Such needles have been documented in Eastern Europe, Portugal, and Southern France — all on or near routes along which knitting would have been carried into Europe from Egypt before diffusing more widely.

One problem with taking this as an indication of hook-tipped needles in prior Egyptian practice is that the presumed origin of knitting there and the more recently observed distribution of hook-tipped needles, are circularly taken to provide evidence of each other. Another problem is that there is no way to determine if the local European hooked-needle traditions all date back to the period when the Egyptian technology would have been transferred, or if they reflect later intra-European cultural exchange or even independent development. (This becomes particularly interesting when considering the relationship between the knitting carried to South America by Iberian colonialists and the indigenous looping traditions, which were often of breathtaking intricacy, in practice before European contact.)

Needles with smooth tips were illustrated in European portraits of “Knitting Madonnas” not all that long after the craft would have arrived in the locations where the paintings were made. The earliest is Italian from ca. 1345. Perhaps the best known of the genre, and certainly the one with the clearest detail, appears on the Buxtehude Altar from ca. 1400. (A set of five needles is shown in an illustration of a sock being knitted from ca. 1450.)

This either gainsays the northward importation (or at least its dating) or indicates that the hooks were dropped in rapid order thereafter — assuming that they were present in the first place. Assessing this also requires account to be taken of the Celtic and Viking knitting in wire prior to the putative arrival of knitting with non-rigid fibers via southern Europe.

It is also often suggested that the first device used for narrow tubular knitting in Egypt was a peg loom. This is based on the relative ease with which such implements can be used to knit all of the stitch structures seen in extant material, with a single hook. If that is accepted as correct, it could then be posited that needle knitting was spawned by the realization that a number of identical hooks could be used in a manner that obviated need for the loom. However, it could be suggested conversely that loom knitting is the younger technique, devised to provide a more easily mastered alternative to multi-needle knitting, also reducing the battery of needles — whether smooth or hook tipped — to a single hook.

There is no conclusive way of determining if loom knitting and needle knitting appeared sequentially in the same lineage or developed independently, perhaps even before either was introduced into Coptic Egypt. Nor is there any reason to assume that both methods were practiced there. Turning the perspective instead to structural detail, the simple and compound open stocking stitch observed in early tubular knitting can be characterized by the parallel chains that are formed at right angles to the path of the yarn as each row is worked into the preceding one.

Such chains also appear in the significantly older plaited fabric widely termed sprang, which is worked in two symmetrical halves toward a central “meeting line.” If this is retained in the final object (which is otherwise split into separate halves), it is secured by one of several methods that include looping a row of chains across the fabric. The plaiting is normally done with bare hands but the room for maneuvering decreases as the two halves approach each other, and the chained form of the meeting line is therefore made with a hook. (I’ll revisit this all in greater historical and technical detail in separate posts and, as sprang is a Swedish word, will also examine relevant documents in which it appears.)

Here is a detail of the simple chain meeting line in the oldest known exemplar of sprang — a cap found in a Danish grave from ca. 1300 BCE,

and another of a compound chain meeting line in a hairnet found at a Danish site from ca. 490 BCE.

Chains also appear in multiple adjacent rows at meeting lines and as decorative ridges in other positions. This structure is properly classified as knitting-type interlooping and is an element of sprang even if not primarily identified with it. As with the early contemporaneous manifestations of remarkably similar forms of needle binding and tubular knitting in Northern Europe and Egypt, sprang also appears in both regions. (Extensive additional material about Nordic and Coptic sprang are found in the monumental Ancient Danish Textiles from Bogs and Burials by Margrethe Hald, who we met in an earlier post about nalbinding and whose illustrations of meeting lines appear above.)

Coptic sprang survives from the 4th century CE and the craft was practiced in Egypt through and beyond the entire period during which knitting developed there. It thus seems reasonable at least to wonder if the simple and compound knitted structures found in sprang, and their production with a hooked needle, provided impetus to the development of true knitting as initially seen in the tubular pieces that began to appear during the 5th century CE.